My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.
Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below.
Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell A-/B+
I suspect that all Americans of a certain age is familiar with the story of Gone With the Wind either from reading the book (often many times) or via the famous movie. I had neither read the book nor seen the movie before starting this saga, though I was familiar with a vague outline of the story, like most Americans of my generation. For readers not familiar with the story, for whatever reason, I'll simply say that it is a long novel first published in 1936, and has long been considered on of the great American novels. It tells the story of Scarlet O'Hara, the cold, proud, driven, and very ruthless daughter of a wealthy Plantation owner in the American South during the years from just prior to the American Civil War to the aftermath of that war known as the Reconstruction era.
Born in 1900, and growing up in Atlanta Georgia, Margaret Mitchell was a writer from an early age, writing stories and novels as a teenager. For Gone with the Wind, she was able to draw on the experiences of people who actually lived through the Civil War and the Reconstruction era that followed the war to create a story rich in the details of that time and to create a novel which reflected the life, and the attitudes of the people who endured the war and its aftermath in the Georgia countryside and the city of Atlanta, a city that was sieged, captured, and eventually burned by General Sherman's army late in the war. Mitchel wrote about those time with a wonderful mix of clear headedness and sentimentality. For that reason, the book is both loved and hated.
Once again I find myself reading and reviewing a book a book that approaches race relations from an earlier historical period. I believe that the time frame and the author must be considered when judging a book. My approach is to take these books a historical records of the time and attitude of the period, and judge the story and writing independently of those considerations.
So let's get those considerations out of the way. First, the book is written from the view point of wealthy, pre-Civil War Southern, slave owning aristocrats. If it had been written from the viewpoint of a small Southern farmer "crackers" or those below them on the social scale, "white trash," this pre-Civil War South would probably look mighty different, far less idyllic and elegant. And while Mitchell is very clear headed about the arrogance, shortcomings, and foolishness of this wealthy class, there is a strong whiff of the "romance" of the "Lost Cause" in their portrayal. Second, slavery is completely whitewashed. None of the ugly sides of slavery is ever shown, and in her very unflattering portrayal of freed slaves, she seems to be saying that the blacks were better off slaves. That said, the main black characters are treated sypathicly, as valued people. Third, she recounts the hardships of Reconstruction to a far greater extent than a story about Scarlett O'Hara would justify. This extended description of the hardships suffered in Georgia resulted in the story rather dragging in the last 1/3 of the story, at least for me. Plus as a Yankee, it invoked no sympathy in my heart. If you start a war, you better damn well win it. And if you don't win it, you must expect to pay the price of defeat, no matter how exacting that price might be, especially for a war that cost the lives of over 600,000 people, not to mention all the life-long scared survivors. And lastly, there is the now objectionable language of the time (both when written and the historical period) that is used when referring to blacks. Any modern reader needs to consider these built-in biases, when choosing whether to to read this book or not.
As for the story itself. It is quite wonderfully written, though perhaps a bit overly long, the pace sagging a bit in Parts 4 & 5, due, as I mentioned, to the overly long account of Reconstruction, as well as less exciting things happening in the later half of the story. Unlike the last saga I read, Mitchell takes you back to the old South in such a wealth of images and details that you will feel that you lived there, sometime in the half-forgotten past. You live those years through thick and thin along with Scarlett. Her writing is very fluent, not only on a sentence level, but in the way she tells the story. You sort of glide through the books shifting from long descriptive passages of places, times, people, seamlessly shifting to Scarlett thoughts, hates, fears, and most of all, her determination to succeed - at any price. Conversations are often more speeches than conversations, but are written so engagingly that they seem quite natural. The speech of all the black people in the story are written in dialect, i.e. misspelled words, take that for what you will, and except for short passages, I did not try to translate them. There is a lot of "telling" in the way this novel is written, but by and large I didn't find it a burden, at least until I neared the end...
I debated what score to give Gone With the Wind; a B+ or an A- and settled on giving it both. While I enjoyed the book a lot, I had my reservations, as stated above. I opted for A- score on the strength of how detailed, atmospheric, and just how sweeping the story Mitchell crafted was, but on a more personal enjoyment level, I did take a a few points off for a score of B+.
It is a very lush book in the sense that it richly recreates a time and place. I think many women read and reread this story as it is a story of a woman who takes charge of her life in a society where women where expected to be seen, not heard. Scarlet is driven and selfish, but usually does the right thing, if only for appearances. I shared you concern, but even if I didn't like her, you must admire her.
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