The Scarecrow and his Servant by Philip Pullman (2004)

Philip Pullman is best known for the His Dark Materials series, but he also writes wonderful children's books. This is one of Pullman's "fairy tales," children's stories with some familiar traditional elements, but wholly original.

In this tale, a fine scarecrow comes to life and employs Jack, a war orphan, ostensibly as a servant--though it's clear who the real brains of the outfit is. Meanwhile, the dastardly Buffalonis are trying to ruin Spring Valley with factories that make chemical poisons. The scarecrow's creator put inside him a document important to restoring the valley to its proper owners, and as he and Jack have adventures, they must also contend with evil agents of the Buffalonis.

I like the words with which Scarecrow's maker sends him out into the world:

'There you are,' he said. 'Now you remember what your job is, and remember where you belong. Be courteous, and be brave, and be honourable, and be kind. And the best of blooming luck.'

Indeed, the scarecrow is gentlemanly, with a rich, sonorous voice; he's very proud of himself, with an endearing tendency to blame everything on birds (though he is courteous to their young). And it is these qualities of being brave, honorable, kind, etc., that will save him and Spring Valley. Luck will be on his side too, not least in meeting Jack, who in the tradition of Jack stories is resourceful and quick-thinking.


I love Pullman's sense of humor here, and also how the fact of Scarecrow's being a scarecrow is never just incidental to the story. Scarecrow, with limbs made of sticks, is somewhat akin to similar items, and at one point falls in love with a beautiful young broom. Sadly, though, she is already in love with...(wait for it)...a rake.

Pullman explains on his Web site that each of his fairy tales has a particular atmosphere—18th century Germany, a version of Indonesia: "The Scarecrow and his Servant, though, belongs to Italy. If it were set to music, it would be played on mandolins, and be in the rhythm of a tarantella." It's a great deal of fun, vivid, amusing, and often touching. The illustrations are a charming addition. This would be a great book to read aloud as well.

Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon's (2009)

Of course, books written since the new millennium are good, too...Chaon is well known for You Remind Me of Me, but I'm not familiar with that one.

East Lynne by Ellen Wood (Mrs. Henry Wood)

Time for another Victorian potboiler! Note: this review gives away some plot details.



One of the best-known sensation novels from the 1860s, East Lynne is a book to be devoured. It's impossible to resist the lively prose, slangy dialogue, vivid characters, and melodramatic events. From a velvet gout stool in the first paragraph to the pious summing-up in the last, the Victorian hits just keep on coming: aristocracy, debt, adultery, spinsters, suppressed love, disguise, consumption, false accusations, suffering mothers, dying children, politics, and revenge. Reading East Lynne in 1862 (on the insistence of the Prince of Wales), a staid middle-aged Professor of Ecclesiastical History raced through its 600-plus pages in three sittings. The story's enduring interest is also testified to by its many dramatic productions, most recently in 1982.


The convoluted plot concerns the classic Victorian pairing of a dark and sinful woman, Lady Isabel, with a blonde and good woman, Barbara Hare. Being beautiful, aristocratic, and touchingly alone and penniless, Lady Isabel captures the heart of upcoming attorney Archibald Carlyle, who asks her to marry him even though he knows she is not in love with him. Perhaps he finds her especially pitiful because he bought her father's estate, East Lynne, before he died bankrupt, and this is a chance to return her to her home. Poor Barbara, meanwhile, truly does love Archibald, and is devastated to learn of their marriage. She's also suffering because her brother Richard is on the run, accused of murdering a local man, and this has turned their mother into an invalid wreck.


Add to this mixture the very badly behaving Sir Francis Levison. He'd flirted with Isabel before her marriage; then, some years afterward, when she's tired and weak from child-bearing and Archibald is not as attentive as he once was, Levison appears again on the scene—to work her ruin. He convinces Isabel that the secretive meetings between Barbara and Archibald (they are discussing how to help Richard) are love liaisons and that he, Levison, is the one who always loved her. Though she has everything to lose, including her children, Isabel feels so jealous and neglected that in a moment of madness, she runs away with Levison to the Continent.


This is only the beginning. Carlyle promptly divorces Isabel, and Levison almost as promptly abandons her, soon after the birth of their child. Isabel then suffers a train crash that conveniently kills her baby and its nurse. She is reported dead, affects a new identity (she is disfigured from the accident), and gains work as a governess. Meanwhile, Carlyle makes Barbara the happiest woman in England. They marry and have children. Guess what family in England happens to need a governess? That's right. In a Lifetime Movie Moment, disguised Isabel returns to her own former house, not as an honored wife and mother, but as an awkward, overlooked governess—not just to Barbara's children but to her own!


This leads to the most fascinating section of the novel, because Isabel's situation is so strange. She's in what used to be her own house where she lived first with her father and then with her husband. Her children are right there, but not her children; she has to call her own daughter "Miss Lucy." She has to accept the Carlyles' instructions as to the children, agree or disagree. This time she sees Carlyle's merits and loves him as she never did when she was his wife; and now she has to see him treating Barbara as lovingly as he once treated her. Isabel's previous life is strangely doubled in front of her, enacted by another, and she has only herself to blame for no longer being the star player.


Up to now, point of view has alternated among the various characters, with a good deal of Barbara Hare worrying about her brother and mooning over Carlyle. In the first part of the book, Barbara is a reasonably attractive figure; she sasses her pompous father and bravely works on behalf of her brother. But once the disguised Isabel comes to East Lynne, we see Barbara from a distance. Barbara secure and beloved is far less interesting than tormented Barbara, and only now does she reveal a certain coldness, saying to Isabel, "No. I never was fond of being troubled with children. When my own grow up into childhood I shall deem the nursery and the schoolroom the fitter place for them."


As Barbara recedes in interest, Isabel, in her physical and mental suffering, becomes more so—though never exactly sympathetic, as she indulges herself in emotions other than repentance:

She tore upstairs to her chamber, and sank down in an agony of tears and despair. Oh, to love him as she did now! To yearn after his affection with this passionate, jealous longing, and to know that they were separated for ever and ever; that she was worse to him than nothing!

Softly, my lady. This is not bearing your cross.

One can't sympathize all that much with her predicament. Mrs. Wood seems to acknowledge here that Isabel has not truly repented, that all her shame and sorrow is more about having ruined her own life than about the real hurt she caused other people. Ostensibly Isabel has taken this risk of returning to East Lynne because she can't bear to be separated any longer from her children. But her attachment never seems more than sentimental; if she cared that much about her children, she wouldn't have abandoned them. It's not as if Carlyle had been abusing her or making her life a misery, after all. She was just bored and felt she deserved more attention.


Nevertheless, the contrast developed in the last part of the book, between Isabel with her passion and grief and Barbara's complacency, undercuts to a large degree the pious moralizing over Isabel's fall. In the end crazy Isabel is just more fun than good Barbara. Without Isabel, after all, there'd be no Frances Davison, and his downfall is the most fun ever. He's manipulated into running for MP against Carlyle, hometown favorite and the man he wronged, to general disgust—and revenge in two flavors, comic and serious. Of course at the end all things are set right, but not before we get to thoroughly enjoy their wrongness.

Life Class by Pat Barker (2008)

As the novel opens, in spring 1914, Paul Tarrant is an art student at the Slade, and not a very successful one. “Is that really the best you can do?” says his professor, devastatingly. (The professor, like many characters in the novel, is a real-life figure, Henry Tonks.) But soon, Paul and his circle are swept up in preparations for war, then war itself. Along the way, Paul briefly becomes romantically involved with a beautiful artist’s model as he considers whether he has a future as an artist.

His friends include Kit Neville, a rich young man who makes his name painting subways and factories, and Elinor Brooke, a rising artist and the woman he falls in love with. Paul and Elinor must each find a deep and genuine way to respond to the war personally and artistically, in ways that are quite different from each other.

I’m deeply fascinated by World War I, and I’ve read Booker Prize-winning Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy set in that period. She’s a highly praised writer and Life Class is no exception: D.J. Taylor of The Guardian, for example, calls her writing here “breathtaking.” But I seem unable to fully appreciate Barker. In her trilogy, I felt she kept breaking off chapters just as they were getting interesting without developing them. With Life Class, although I was interested in the book and kept reading, I also could not join in the praise.

To begin with, I found the characters to be rather thin soup. Paul and Elinor are attractive, charming, talented (at first, Elinor more than Paul), but don’t really seem to have any faults. I was pleased when we got to hear the unattractive, bullying, self-seeking Neville’s point of view for once, because at least he has some personality. Here he is on a visit to Elinor’s parents’ house in the country, wanting desperately to be back in London, with “grit in his eyes, advertising everywhere, steam, people, pistons turning. Anything to escape from the clamorous boredom of trees” (108). I loved the passage where Neville, Elinor, and Paul go on a two-mile bicycle ride, out-of-shape Neville hating it the whole way, wondering why they couldn’t have just taken the car, for Christ’s sake. I sympathized.

Without the overwhelmingness of the Great War, the trenches, the gangrene, the mud, the horror, as a backdrop of automatic significance and to give Paul and Elinor something to respond to, would we ever care about them? I don’t think so.

Many novelists talk about art with a bias towards subject, towards the picture’s story or narrative, rather than discussing things like brushwork, technique, form, balance of light and dark and so on. Barker often displays this bias. What distinguishes her characters’ works is almost always what they depict—pastoral landscapes, trains, portraits, or hospitals—not how they are depicted. Occasionally Barker recognizes a more painterly point of view, as when Paul admires one of Elinor’s paintings: “If he stayed at the Slade another ten years he’d never be able to paint sunlight on wet flesh like that” (p. 69). But when Paul paints his breakthrough picture, what makes it a breakthrough is its subject. Presumably it takes some skill to paint a man with gangrene too, but he manages to do it without benefit of the Slade. How?

I was also surprised to see quite a few clunkers in a book by such a lauded writer, like this terribly stale simile: “boarded-up buildings at intervals along the terrace like black teeth in a smile.” Or a character suggesting an “open marriage,” a term whose earliest cited entry in Merriam Webster is 1971. Or using the term “painting” vastly more often than “picture,” which (I believe, anyway; I could be wrong) was the preferred locution of the time. I also found it strange that we get careful physical descriptions of all the characters except Paul, whose appearance is withheld until page 211, for some reason. Teresa’s and Elinor’s interest in him and Neville’s jealousy would have made a whole lot more sense if we’d known about those “heavy-lidded, slanting, dark eyes…straight shoulders and narrow waist.”

In a similar vein, I thought a more nuanced writer wouldn’t have to come straight out and tell us things like “Paul thought he detected a lot of tension beneath the surface in this family. Neville was in awe of his father, a war correspondent who’d faced anger in every corner of the world. Throughout his life the father had gravitated towards violent conflict, and the son was desperate to measure up. No easy matter if the worst danger you face is a collapsing easel. But it made sense of the younger man’s preoccupation with virility in art” (p. 52). Thank you, Captain Exposition.

I’m being harsh on a book I did, after all, enjoy reading. There’s a very interesting scene when Neville views a painting of the Last Judgment, in the summer before the war starts. Though he hates the subject, saying it’s not relevant to the modern world, he sees its power; he “saw that he was in the presence of greatness,” which is an interesting comment on Neville, and it’s fascinating how the painting foreshadows events to come in Ypres: “wormlike people hid in holes in the ground or stared up at flashes of light in the sky.” Maybe Neville will come to see its relevance.

Although I criticized Barker’s clunkiness, she can also achieve a beautiful turn of phrase. Here, Paul, lonely in Belgium and thinking he won’t see Elinor again, has just had an unsatisfactory encounter with a prostitute: “He fumbled into his clothes as fast as he could and clattered downstairs, out onto the slushy street, feeling as if he’d committed a small, unimportant murder” (287).

I wouldn’t call this novel breathtaking, but worth reading if you’re interesting in the Great War, art of the time, or even the Bloomsbury set, which Elinor gets involved with.