Rumer Godden, Greengage Summer
Feb. 24th, 2012 05:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
opusculasedferaRead Rumer Godden's Greengage Summer today because I'd loved her books as a kid and it invariably takes me an embarassingly long time to realise that authors I read as a child might have written anything else. Realised about half-way through that it was probably good I never found it as a child because it belongs to a genre I found intensely frustrating as a kid.
It's one of those books that takes a perfectly serviceable children's book plot (children go on holiday with their mum! she gets sick! they end up largely unsupervised except by a kindly stranger! he turns out to be a jewel thief! but is foiled at the end because he can't leave them quite as abruptly as he needs to in order to escape the cops because he has become attached!) and turns it into tedious musings on loss of innocence. So it's all grittily realistic and their mum is quite sick and not just too sick to supervise, but in hospital and no one seems to know how long she'll be there or what will happen, and the protagonist is disconcerted in the way that a 13 year old would be at being left more or less in charge of younger siblings and really doesn't know how to deal with it because she's just old enough to know that adults are not in charge by default and she can't rely on the hotel staff, but not old enough to know what she should do instead or have the adults take her seriously. And the jewel thief plot line is all heavy-handed grim and sordid. It's not about exciting thefts, but minutiae about his relationship with the owner of the hotel they're all staying at who is in love with him, but who he is pretty clearly using as an alibi, with bonus awkwardness because the observing narrator is a 13 year-old in the 1920s, and on the very cusp of puberty to the point of getting her first period during the novel, so she's simultaneously fascinated by the implication of sex and not sure if it would be better if she wasn't thinking about it because it makes things so much more complicated.
It's less frustrating than these sorts of books were as a child because I can see what Godden is going for, whereas they used to just confuse me because I did not get the narrative conventions going on there at ALL (plus when you haven't quite hit puberty yourself all the stuff about it just flies right over your head, or at least it did mine). Unfortunately I don't seem to have grown any fonder of it despite this. It certainly hits psychological accuracy, but it doesn't interest me. The narrator is all twisted up and worried and confused and complicated inside, but we don't really get much in the way of complexity out of the set up. It's obvious that the narrator is missing things, but it never comes across as because grown-up emotions and sexual relationships are complicated so much as it does the narrator being clueless about all of it. I sort of feel like I did that kind of baffled, thanks ever so, and it's not really a headspace that was interesting or particularly illuminating. Emotions and sex are complicated, sure, but not in the way that they seem to be when you've only just realised that those things happen and you haven't quite worked out how or why.
And the ending was truly ludicrous and just made it feel like a failed parody. The stranger who's been watching the kids throughout the whole book has always been slightly sketchy and has his own stuff going on, but suddenly we get full on children's mystery novel events where the kids are taking walks and see him disposing of his motorbike and wearing quite different clothes, and then suddenly news of the jewel thefts and cops showing up and talking up this guy as the greatest thief ever and he always escapes and it's terribly important that they catch him! Which is basically Famous Five level material, just with a thin veneer of realism so they don't dramatically foil him, but are conflicted about turning him in because he's been nice, and the protagonist is feeling really guilty because she saw him stab a guy when he ran off in the middle of the night so she thinks she really should turn him in (especially as the guy was sort of their friend, but also kind of sketchy and creeping on her older sister and trying to get into her bedroom at night, so she's sort of grateful the thief got rid of him. Incidentally, there's a lot of sketchy stuff throughout about the way that older men respond to the protagonist's 16 year old sister and the way that everyone around them tends to assume that any sketch going on is her own fault and it's still all grim and realistic, but also tedious! I am aware that woman's place is in the wrong and so on, but it's just unpleasant to read about.) Mostly I just feel like the Famous Five-esque version would have been more fun, especially as Godden is clearly talented enough to give her mystery solving kids definite personalities (I enjoyed Willmouse, the protagonist's younger brother, who is going to be a fashion designer someday and is fairly endearing as he plans for it and practises designing and sewing and giving imaginary interviews to Vogue) and to give all the adults real backstories and emotions, so it would have only been slightly ludicrous.
Instead it was all tragic and loss-of-innocence-y and that annoys me. Because either we're supposed to take all of the fussing as just the narrator's personal confusion - in which case I would have infinitely preferred the It Gets Better version because it does, honestly - or we were supposed to be sad about it. And if we're supposed to be sad, then I'm annoyed because the problem, as far as I could see, was not that sex-knowledge was actually so terrible, but that complete innocence leaves girls vulnerable to men who take advantage of them knowing nothing, and doesn't protect them from everyone assuming that they aren't innocent and that therefore everything is their fault. So it came across as accurate, but frustrating because it stops just short of identifying the systemic problem of gender roles in our society and instead goes back to how tragic it is when women fall short of those rules, even if it's not their fault.
I suppose I can say period piece (written in the 1950s and clearly based on the author's 1920s teenage years: Godden recycles some sibling stories from her autobiography) and move on, but it was interesting because it made me realise that those books that annoyed me as a kid were part of this whole genre, even if I like it no better now. Also I was coming directly off having read Lesley A. Hall's (who is on DW, but I'm not sure if she wants to have her real name linked to that?) tremendously enjoyable biography of Stella Browne so I was particularly aware of exactly how progressive things could get in the 1920s, even if Browne was way out in the vanguard of progressive thought. I do recommend the Browne biography though: infinitely more satisfying.
It's one of those books that takes a perfectly serviceable children's book plot (children go on holiday with their mum! she gets sick! they end up largely unsupervised except by a kindly stranger! he turns out to be a jewel thief! but is foiled at the end because he can't leave them quite as abruptly as he needs to in order to escape the cops because he has become attached!) and turns it into tedious musings on loss of innocence. So it's all grittily realistic and their mum is quite sick and not just too sick to supervise, but in hospital and no one seems to know how long she'll be there or what will happen, and the protagonist is disconcerted in the way that a 13 year old would be at being left more or less in charge of younger siblings and really doesn't know how to deal with it because she's just old enough to know that adults are not in charge by default and she can't rely on the hotel staff, but not old enough to know what she should do instead or have the adults take her seriously. And the jewel thief plot line is all heavy-handed grim and sordid. It's not about exciting thefts, but minutiae about his relationship with the owner of the hotel they're all staying at who is in love with him, but who he is pretty clearly using as an alibi, with bonus awkwardness because the observing narrator is a 13 year-old in the 1920s, and on the very cusp of puberty to the point of getting her first period during the novel, so she's simultaneously fascinated by the implication of sex and not sure if it would be better if she wasn't thinking about it because it makes things so much more complicated.
It's less frustrating than these sorts of books were as a child because I can see what Godden is going for, whereas they used to just confuse me because I did not get the narrative conventions going on there at ALL (plus when you haven't quite hit puberty yourself all the stuff about it just flies right over your head, or at least it did mine). Unfortunately I don't seem to have grown any fonder of it despite this. It certainly hits psychological accuracy, but it doesn't interest me. The narrator is all twisted up and worried and confused and complicated inside, but we don't really get much in the way of complexity out of the set up. It's obvious that the narrator is missing things, but it never comes across as because grown-up emotions and sexual relationships are complicated so much as it does the narrator being clueless about all of it. I sort of feel like I did that kind of baffled, thanks ever so, and it's not really a headspace that was interesting or particularly illuminating. Emotions and sex are complicated, sure, but not in the way that they seem to be when you've only just realised that those things happen and you haven't quite worked out how or why.
And the ending was truly ludicrous and just made it feel like a failed parody. The stranger who's been watching the kids throughout the whole book has always been slightly sketchy and has his own stuff going on, but suddenly we get full on children's mystery novel events where the kids are taking walks and see him disposing of his motorbike and wearing quite different clothes, and then suddenly news of the jewel thefts and cops showing up and talking up this guy as the greatest thief ever and he always escapes and it's terribly important that they catch him! Which is basically Famous Five level material, just with a thin veneer of realism so they don't dramatically foil him, but are conflicted about turning him in because he's been nice, and the protagonist is feeling really guilty because she saw him stab a guy when he ran off in the middle of the night so she thinks she really should turn him in (especially as the guy was sort of their friend, but also kind of sketchy and creeping on her older sister and trying to get into her bedroom at night, so she's sort of grateful the thief got rid of him. Incidentally, there's a lot of sketchy stuff throughout about the way that older men respond to the protagonist's 16 year old sister and the way that everyone around them tends to assume that any sketch going on is her own fault and it's still all grim and realistic, but also tedious! I am aware that woman's place is in the wrong and so on, but it's just unpleasant to read about.) Mostly I just feel like the Famous Five-esque version would have been more fun, especially as Godden is clearly talented enough to give her mystery solving kids definite personalities (I enjoyed Willmouse, the protagonist's younger brother, who is going to be a fashion designer someday and is fairly endearing as he plans for it and practises designing and sewing and giving imaginary interviews to Vogue) and to give all the adults real backstories and emotions, so it would have only been slightly ludicrous.
Instead it was all tragic and loss-of-innocence-y and that annoys me. Because either we're supposed to take all of the fussing as just the narrator's personal confusion - in which case I would have infinitely preferred the It Gets Better version because it does, honestly - or we were supposed to be sad about it. And if we're supposed to be sad, then I'm annoyed because the problem, as far as I could see, was not that sex-knowledge was actually so terrible, but that complete innocence leaves girls vulnerable to men who take advantage of them knowing nothing, and doesn't protect them from everyone assuming that they aren't innocent and that therefore everything is their fault. So it came across as accurate, but frustrating because it stops just short of identifying the systemic problem of gender roles in our society and instead goes back to how tragic it is when women fall short of those rules, even if it's not their fault.
I suppose I can say period piece (written in the 1950s and clearly based on the author's 1920s teenage years: Godden recycles some sibling stories from her autobiography) and move on, but it was interesting because it made me realise that those books that annoyed me as a kid were part of this whole genre, even if I like it no better now. Also I was coming directly off having read Lesley A. Hall's (who is on DW, but I'm not sure if she wants to have her real name linked to that?) tremendously enjoyable biography of Stella Browne so I was particularly aware of exactly how progressive things could get in the 1920s, even if Browne was way out in the vanguard of progressive thought. I do recommend the Browne biography though: infinitely more satisfying.
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