Tender Morsels by Margo Flanagan (2008)

The title of this YA novel comes from the Grimms’ fairy tale “Snow-White and Rose-Red,” one of my childhood favorites. As I read, I recognized many elements from that story (the two sisters, the ungrateful dwarf who receives their help, the friendly bear, the treasure, and so on), and I enjoyed seeing how Lanagan uses them here. Tender Morsels is a much darker re-telling or transformation, one that immediately drew me right in—but the tale suffered as it went on.


It’s really too bad. Lanagan has an interesting way with language, just strange enough for a fairy-tale feel but not too fake-archaic, especially when characters like the hedge-witch ("mudwife" in the novel) speak: “‘I weren’t desprit. I were bored. Bored, bored. Bored of coal-scuttles and thin porridge and cat-soup and chilblings and blankets made of paper. A bit of pokelee-thumpelee were something to sparkle up my day.’” Lanagan adds a necessary distance and strangeness with locutions like “littlee-man” for a dwarf. She also writes lively descriptions: “And the marsh—who knew what lay under that sheet of silver lumped with reedy islets, arrowed with the wakes of ducks?” Very nice.

I also liked the set-up, where a 15-year-old girl in terrible circumstances, driven to a desperate choice, is removed by a celestial power to a world like her own, but made over as her heart’s desire: safe, calm, predictable. You want it for her, but it’s also easy to understand how that world isn’t enough, eventually, for one of her daughters, and why it sets up conflict.

How many YA novels by now have concerned themselves with themes of incest, abuse and rape? Even when I was in high school—and next year will be our 30th reunion—it seemed like I couldn’t bring home a new YA book that wasn’t about those topics. When I realized Tender Morsels would be another such, I mentally sighed. As I read, though, I found myself impressed at first by how skillfully Lanagan makes these themes fit with how a fairy-tale heroine traditionally suffers (which can, after all, include threats of incest—see, for example, “Cap o’Rushes,” “All-Kinds-of-Fur,” and the like).

Most regrettably, the novel increasingly loses its grip (starting around p. 142, of 433 pages) as it departs more and more from the underlying fairy tale, and as the focus shifts from the mother Liga to her two daughters. By p. 296, the story seemed at a natural end and I wondered why it would go on—but Tender Morsels continues for another 130 or so. The book’s initial fascinating alchemy loses its magic, dwindling into one long thinly disguised therapy session for abuse survivors. It’s a bit cringeworthy to see how naked the revenge fantasy becomes, and how obviously one character becomes stand-in for a therapist.

As I say, too bad, because it all started so promisingly! We moved out of the magic circle of a storyteller at the hearth, flames flickering and the room deep with shadows, and into a fluorescent-lit church basement support group. Such a shame.

The Angel’s Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafón (2008; translation by Lucia Graves, copyright 2009)

When a mysterious gentleman who doesn’t blink offers you what you most desire, even immortality, warning bells should go off. But young writer David Martín is desperate. And all he has to do is create a new religion, or at least its story: how hard could that be for the man who churns out penny dreadfuls at 6.66 (uh huh) pages a day? And anyway, as Martín maintains in the opening sentence of The Angel’s Game, “A writer never forgets the first time he accepted a few coins or a word of praise in exchange for a story. . . . from then on he is doomed and his soul has a price.” The unblinking gentleman, publisher Andreas Corelli, is just offering a better price.

Much like the sensation novels Martín writes, with “plots as thick and murky as the water in the port,” The Angel’s Game is melodramatic, darkly atmospheric, sometimes silly, but greatly entertaining if you like that sort of thing—and I do. I also like the setting, a Barcelona that’s as moody, seductive, mysterious, and doom-laden as any femme fatale (so compelling, in fact, that Martín titles his newspaper serial Mysteries of Barcelona and his penny dreadfuls City of the Damned).


Equally spooky is the house Martín rents, especially its tower room containing a seductive Underwood typewriter “for which, alone, I would have paid the price of the rent,” he says, stroking the typewriter keys lovingly. Though there’s a doomed love affair (of course), books and writing are much more convincing love objects in this novel, like Martín’s childhood copy of Great Expectations, restored to him by Corelli: “I stared at the bundle of paper that to me, in a not so distant past, had seemed to contain all the magic and light of the world.”


But magic in this book isn’t so light. Things get dark and complicated, haunted by connections between and among Martín, his shadowy tower house, and past tragedies. Bodies start to pile up in Grand Guignol fashion as Martín gets more and more embroiled in his real-life sensation thriller, and he slowly realizes the true nature of his bargain.


The translation by Lucia Graves is excellent, with only a few infelicities. I did sometimes wished that street names and so on were translated, because names can be so evocative. The name of a brothel, for instance, is given as El Ensueño; it helps to know this means The Dream.


More importantly—I had great fun reading this book, thoroughly enjoying the melodrama, mystery, and atmosphere. The first half was stronger, I thought, with some humor to lighten things up a bit here and there. The unrelenting and somewhat repetitively arrived at body count in the last half wasn’t always satisfying. Some complications seem to exist for the sake of complication. But I liked the recurring images of blood/water/tears/drowning and fire/arson/flames—in both cases, associated with both destruction and purification. As are books and writing, come to think of it.


I didn’t quite know how to read the ending and I sort of didn’t believe it. But that’s only a few pages out of the whole, and didn’t affect my great enjoyment of this twisted, book-adoring book.

The Book of Lost Things by John Connolly (2006).

Here is a tip from me to you: Avoid any novel that directly mentions Stories, Importance Of, as Connolly’s novel does in the very first line. Wherever it started (Joan Didion in The White Album--“We tell ourselves stories in order to live”?) I first noticed in  fiction somewhere around Ursula Hegi’s disgusting 1994 novel Stones from the River. Later examples include Lisa See in Snow Flower and the Secret Fan (2005) or Keith Donohue with The Stolen Child (2006): a sensitive misunderstood child negotiates an unfair, oppressive world with the help of Stories and all they are said to tap into, which always seems to include a rich vein of self-pity. Some writers—Michael Chabon and Philip Pullman come to mind—do manage to handle themes of childhood and storytelling gracefully. John Connolly is not one of them.

The novel promises to be excitingly spooky, something along the lines of the film Pan’s Labyrinth. To quote the back cover: “High in his attic bedroom, twelve-year-old David mourns the death of his mother, with only the books on his shelf for company. But those books have begun to whisper to him in the darkness.” But the promise fizzles out as this becomes a clumsy quest story with obvious debts to The Wizard of Oz, the Narnia books (especially the setting, London in the early years of WWII), and the Stephen King-Peter Straub collaboration The Talisman: David is lured to an enchanted fairy-tale world through a crack in the garden wall, and there he must escape great dangers and find the king in order to get home, helped along the way by figures like the Woodsman and the knight Roland.

In the cover blurbs, the Los Angeles Times singles out Connolly’s “evocative style” for praise. Evocative of a tin ear, maybe: unsubtle, badly judged, ludicrously inconsistent. Infelicities stud the book like raisins in rice pudding, especially when we get to the adventure. “Roland had shared with Fletcher what he knew of the wolves.” “Shared with” to mean “told”? That would be bad usage for 1940s, let alone for a timeless fairytale world. A terrifying harpy appears: “David had an opportunity to examine its face as it hovered.” David might as well be examining a watch face for all the emotion that displays. A band of suspicious villagers calls out “‘Come no closer until you have identified yourselves.’” “Identified yourselves?” Peasants don’t talk like that. Roland decides not to mention something controversial: “‘I will not trouble them with my views.’” “My views”? Knights don’t talk like that.

Sometimes Connolly puts on his Story-Teller Hat, imitating fairytales through heavy iambs and anapests, no contractions, and lots of prepositional phrases:

Once upon a time—for that is how all stories should begin—there was a boy who lost his mother.

[Stories] were like seeds in the beak of a bird, waiting to fall to earth, or the notes of a song laid out on a sheet, yearning for an instrument to bring their music into being.

This is how things came to pass.

“Sometimes, children stray from the path and become lost in the forest, and they are never seen again. They die there, consumed by beasts or slain by evil men, and their blood soaks into the ground.

As individual sentences those aren’t so very bad, but Connolly can’t seem to handle moving from one register to another with any grace. First we have, in fairy-tale diction, "Already he feared to hear the silence of the woods shattered by the howling of wolves and Loups." This is immediately followed by "As they walked, David had a chance to examine his surroundings." The first sentence is full of portent and iambs and archaic flavor, and the second becomes strangely flat.

Compare this sentence from the Grimms’ version of “Snow White” (usefully included in the book’s reading guide): “But now the poor child was all alone in the great forest, and so terrified that she looked at every leaf of every tree, and did not know what to do.” She did not coolly “examine” her “surroundings,” just as David probably did not coolly “examine” the harpy’s face. Connolly often seems to think that stuffy vocabulary has the same effect as an authentic fairytale narrative voice.

Sometimes Connolly’s Story-Teller Hat is borrowed from Stephen King on a bad day:

[David] could only conjure up a half-formed being that crouched in the cobwebbed corners of his imagination where all the things that he feared curled and slithered upon one another in the darkness.

Connolly seems to expect his English teacher to write “Lively!” in the margins, but portentous alliteration (conjure, crouched, cobwebbed, corners, curled) is a pretty cheap and easy trick. And again, alongside all this portentousness, we get passages like this:

David’s relations with [his stepmother] Rose were not good. . . . It was not merely that she had taken, or was trying to take, the place of his mother, although that was bad enough. Her attempts to cook meals that he liked for dinner, despite the pressures of rationing, irritated him.

No 12-year-old boy, today or in 1941, experiences his life with phrases like “relations with Rose”; “her attempts to cook meals”; “despite the pressures of rationing.” The entire novel lurches clumsily like this from one diction register to another, from fairy tales to cheap horror to dull reporting to, in one horribly misconceived episode, broad working-class-accented comedy.

Worse, the style badly serves the story. All that creepy ookiness in the alliterative passage has nothing to do with David’s particular fears. His mother has died, already just about the worst thing that can happen to a child, and now his father has remarried and had another son. He hasn’t wished gruesome death on his half-brother or stepmother; he’s not obsessed with images of his mother rotting in her grave; he’s committed no sin in thought or deed that should fill him with self-disgust. It's not rot and contamination that David fears; it's abandonment.

In fact, the passage about David and his stepmother would seem to be a good time to tap into David’s real fears, but the simple-minded psychologizing (“It was not merely that she had taken, or was trying to take, the place of his mother”) removes any sense of black, frightening undercurrents. Perhaps David just needs more self-esteem, or more validation from his father? Nothing about this passage suggests that what he does need is a terrifying and dangerous quest.

But that's just one example. The novel finds many other ways to go wrong. David manages to encounter, in the enchanted adventure world, issues of child molestation, homosexuality (Roland has a Special Friend), and class struggle, all filtered through a very modern understanding. The Snow-White chapters left me gape-mouthed with amazement at how exuberantly bad they are. Here David has just met the seven dwarfs:

“Names?” said the first dwarf. “Names? Course we have names. I”—he gave a little, self-important cough—“am Comrade Brother Number One. These are Comrade Brothers Numbers Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, and Eight.”

“What happened to Seven?” asked David.

There was an embarrassed silence.

“We don’t talk about Former Comrade Brother Number Seven,” said Comrade Brother Number One, eventually. “He has been officially excised from the Party’s records.”

You see, David’s books in his room have been talking out loud to him, to themselves, and to each other, and Snow White somehow was shelved next to a book on communism…well, that’s a tiny bit funny, or would be in a completely different book.

But when a dwarf asks David if he’s “sizeist,” how does that make any sense? How would someone 60 years ago even know how to parse that? This adventure world is supposed to be linked to David’s imaginative world, and I simply don’t believe such scenes could be part of it. And the real question is what this episode is doing in a book that otherwise takes itself and David’s quest extremely seriously, a book that proclaims stories are “yearning for an instrument to bring their music into being.” I suppose the instrument could be a kazoo.

The book should end when David returns from his quest, but takes yet another misguided direction at the end. We learn too much about David’s grown-up life, and events no longer seem to make sense in a narrative way, they seem as disconnected as real life. All this fuss about his father marrying Rose, and they wind up divorced anyway? I was suspecting autobiography already (also confirmed in the appended reader’s guide), when we discover that David “became a writer and he wrote a book. He called it The Book of Lost Things, and the book that you are holding is the book that he wrote. And when children would ask him if it was true, he would tell them that, yes, it was true, or as true as anything in this world can be, for that was how he remembered i.t” This is tiresome in too many ways to list, but in that, it’s consistent with the whole.

Writers who go on and on about the magic of stories ought to dazzle more and annoy less.

The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science by Richard Holmes (2008)

Richard Holmes defines Romantic science as "the second scientific revolution, which swept through Britain at the end of the eighteenth century and produced a new vision." Although most think of Romanticism as opposed to the aims and processes of science, Holmes sees both forces as being united by the notion of wonder.

Keats, for instance, uses the thrill of discovery as experienced by astronomers and explorers to explain his own thrill at reading Chapman's translation of Homer: "Then felt I like some watcher of the skies / When a new planet swims into his ken / Or like stout Cortez, when with wond'ring eyes [the MS original, later changed to "eagle eyes] / He star'd at the Pacific--and all his men / Look'd at each other with a wild surmise..." It's an exuberant book, filled with the wonder and delight he describes, and thoroughly entertaining.

The "new planet" was Uranus, discovered by William Herschel, and Holmes devotes much time in this account to Herschel. Holmes's method is mainly biographical, looking at important Romantic scientists and explorers like Herschel and his astronomer sister Caroline, Joseph Banks, Humphrey Davy, and Mungo Park. Throughout, he brings in writers like Coleridge, Keats, Percy Bysshe and Mary Shelley, showing how exciting new ideas and tropes circulated back and forth among poets, writers, and opinion makers.

The new science could also seem dark and disturbing, and Holmes discusses Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and his Creature in this light. Shelley's achievement seems all the more brilliant here in how perfectly she captures ambivalence toward the growing power of scientists (a word first invented in this time period) to penetrate nature's secrets.

I loved this insightful, informative, energetic book, which doesn't just describe but transmits the excitement and wonder of the age.