Homages

It may seem like Isaac is the only one doing any reading, but, alas, it is just that he is the only one writing about what he's reading.

I've finally gotten around to reading a few of the homages to Jane Austen that have proliferated in recent years--one that I really wanted to read, and one that Isaac told me I should.

Perhaps because my expectations for the latter were so low, I found the former far more disappointing.

Of all the derivative works that have come out of Austen's corpus these last few years, I thought I would really enjoy P. D. James's Death Comes to Pemberley.  James is a strong writer, and though I sometimes feel her mysteries are a just a little too Freudian, I never find them dull.  She is, like Austen, acutely aware of both the foibles and the promise of humanity, but she is confident enough in her own style that she wouldn't feel the need merely to mimic Austen.  I really believed she was up to the challenge of writing a sequel to Pride and Prejudice.
(more after the jump, with possible vague spoilers)



Meh.

She did avoid mimicking Austen's style--her book has none of the delicacy or wit of Austen, and that's just fine.  Those are not James's strengths.

Unfortunately, she also seemed to have given up on the one trait she genuinely shares with Austen, and that is her attentiveness to character.  Her probing account of the human psyche--deftly and convincingly managed in, say, The Children of Men--is entirely absent here.  The characters are cardboard at best, and the modestly well-constructed plot is too ploddingly recounted to remedy the deficiencies of characterization.

I suppose the real trouble is that it is hard to write convincingly about Happily Ever After.  James doesn't fall prey to the worst errors--drippy sentimentalism, improbable plot devices that keep all the narrative tension safely away from the happy couple, or a sort of dull stasis that makes Happily Ever After seem interminable.

(Lydia and Wickham inhabit that stasis, but they should.  Not as a fitting punishment for their sins, but because stasis is the only option for the self-serving and self-deluding.)

Perhaps she spent too much time avoiding pitfalls and didn't have any real vision of her own to pursue.  I don't know.  In any case, I was expecting to find it engaging and didn't.  For the first 200 pages, I kept reading, telling myself she would shine "once she gets all the, you know, transitional stuff out of the way."  And for the last hundred, I read to see how she would clue Darcy and Elizabeth in to the (by then) obvious solution to the mystery.

I did appreciate her restraint in not making the obvious mistakes--killing off people or souring their marriages or pairing them off willy-nilly just for sport.  But I did not appreciate the clunky, ham-handed introduction of unrelated characters from the Austenverse at the end.  Harriet Martin has no place as the deus ex machina of a Pride and Prejudice sequel.  It just doesn't work.

Believe it or not, Seth Grahame-Smith's clumsy attempt to stick zombies into Austen's narrative does work, at least for the first hundred or so pages, where the silliness of it is just novel enough to amuse and entertain.

I started Pride and Prejudice and Zombies while I was still reading Death Comes to Pemberley, and, at first, I thought it would be a disaster.

Grahame-Smith essentially takes the text of Austen's work, abridges it moderately (in all the expected places--it almost reads like the script of the BBC adaptation of the book), and fills up the vacancies with zombies wherever he can.

He doesn't bother to write the zombie parts in an Austenian style (at least, not obviously), and they have absolutely no cohesion with the rest of the story.  They stick out like a zombie's dead, rotting thumb.

But as soon as Mr. Bennet called out, "Girls!  Pentagram of Death!" I was hooked.  It was ridiculous and I was ready to enjoy it.

Alas, the feeling only lasted for the first section of the book.  After a while, there were few new jokes to add, and all the freshness drained out of Grahame-Smith's insertions.  The few minor plot changes were, well, you know, whatevs.

I wonder if the choice to use Austen's words wherever possible helped or hurt.  Certainly when I started the book, it seemed to work--almost like a musician cutting together Mozart and U2 and really working it.  

But I wonder if he would have been able to play around more in the second half of the book, to generate more real silliness and invent more absurd juxtapositions, if he had been forced to write the entire thing in his own style.  I think it might have been a more effective parody if he had manipulated Austen more.  (Imagine a song parody that only replaces a few of the words of the original--not nearly as funny as one that uses entirely new words, or that plays with rhymes and allusions to the original as often as possible while constructing genuinely new meanings.)

So.  I didn't love either of them, but I think both of them could have been good.