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.
Mansfield Park by Jane Austen B-
This is not the first Jane Austen book I've read, though to be honest, I'm not sure what the other one was. I suspect it was Pride and Prejudice. But that was at least 30 years ago, and I only remember picking it off the classic shelf of the little library to read, nothing of the story. While I enjoyed this book, it is not one I'm going to reread every year or two, like true fans of Miss Austen.
My interest in this book is entirely due to my recent Georgette Heyer books. I wanted to see how a story written in the period would read, if only to compare it to the more recent, but certainly not recent, works of Georgette Heyer. If you are interested in the story itself, move along. You can find that on other places on the internet to satisfy that curiosity. So how does Heyer's Regency Books - the couple I've read - compare to this Austen book?
The Heyer books that I've read have much more colorful characters. Fanny Price, the main protagonist in this story is rather colorless and is no doubt meant to be so. She is, for the most part an observer rather than a player. Maybe you get to know all the main characters perhaps a bit deeper than in the Heyer books, but it's hard to say. You certainly get a lot more speeches in the Austen books, some go on for pages explaining their feelings. While the story in Mansfield Park has it moments of tension and drama, they are set within a fairly mundane venue. Well, the mundane venue of wealthy people who don't have to work for their living. This is true for the Heyer books as well. Almost no one in any of the stories I've read actually do anything. That's not quite true. The women sit around and sew things. All the time. And Sir Thomas, the master of Mansfield Park does have to go off to the West Indies to look after his business concerns there, but otherwise, all the characters in both this story, and in the Heyer stories I've read, fill their days with riding horse, riding in carriages, visiting, dancing, clubbing, and gambling.
In these stories there is a clear sense of the helplessness of women in society - the limits of their freedom, and how the clever ones can overcome some of these limits with wit, charm, and cunning. In both stories, one is introduced to a time when people were commonly in ill health, which often plays a role in the stories.
As one would expect, the Heyer books are written in a more modern style, than Austen's book. They move along quicker, have more action, and are less reflective. I read books for entertainment and, in the case of historical fiction, for an insight in to life in another place and time, so that I can not address the issues that Jane Austen may've been addressing in her story. I suspect that she was addressing issues, but they likely either went over my head, or were absorbed unconsciously.
While I enjoyed Mansfield Park, I read in two days, I can't say that it entirely enchanted me. There is an ever-so-slightly remove from the story in the narration, and indeed, Jane either ran out of time, paper, or interest, as the ending is rather unsatisfactory - a simple summarization of the fall out of the main plot resolutions. On the whole, while recognizing the worth of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, I prefer the Georgette Heyer's stories I've so far read a bit more.
A side note: The 1999 movie of this novel is free on YouTube and I have given it 25 minutes of my time. Of course a 2 hour movie is not going to directly replicate a book, and one must expect things will be sliced, diced, and condensed. And from what I could tell, they were. Rather drastically. What was most telling, however, was the re-imagining of the heroine, Fanny Price. In the book she is quiet, submissive, rather sickly, intelligent, and observant, but is about as effervescent as dishwater, after washing the dishes. In the movie she is creative, cheerful, playful, unrecognizable from the Fanny in the novel. One could see why this transformation was necessary, but it is quite jarring and off-putting if you, like me, have the book fresh in your mind. In short, don't mistake the movie for the book.
No comments:
Post a Comment