Ben & Jen Shepard

The Red Tent by Anita Diamant

I recently recommended this book to a friend and in doing so was reminded of what a rare gem it is.  I don’t think I had read even a paragraph in before I was struck dumb by the smoothness of Diamant’s writing.  I don’t know how else to explain it.  It was like poetry, if prose could be poetry.  It was like floating ribbons of words carrying you effortlessly along the rolls and swells of an engrossing story.  I often found myself stopping to read a sentence two or three times over, just to enjoy the sound of it in my ear, the feel of it in my mouth.

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Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire

Feeling a bit experimental one day, I decided to bust out of my usual literary genres (historical novels, fantasy, funny pet books like Marley & Me) and I picked up the much-talked-about best-seller, Wicked.  Firstly,  I have to be honest.  I never really liked The Wizard of Oz.  For someone who so thoroughly enjoys delving into Middle Earth or exploring the Village of Hogsmeade, this a little surprising.  So  I was skeptical as to whether I would enjoy Wicked at all.

The results were varied.  This is a totally different Oz than the one I had seen in the 1939 film with Judy Garland.  I was not an outsider this time, blown in to a strange world on a tornado.  Instead, I experienced it as if I lived there along with a myriad of colorful characters.  Except that this did not make me an insider either.   Maguire never really connected me to Oz or to most of its inhabitants in a way that made it feel like a familiar place.  The only one I felt any sense of relation to was, as the title suggests, the Witch.  And even that was in a limited sense, although I wonder if it wasn’t purposeful.

The green-skinned protagonist is called Elphaba (a name which Maguire fashioned from the initials of Lyman Frank Baum, L-F-B, the original creator of Oz.) Elphaba is from the start a complex and polarized character.  She is both admirable and awful,  good and wicked.  She embodies the central question of this novel: what is the true nature of good and evil?

How the book goes about posing this question is not typical.  The writing style took some getting used to.  I noticed that although Elphaba is the main character, we rarely if ever get to know what she is thinking, which contributes to the disconnected feeling.  Usually the author gives the reader insight into the main character’s thoughts, which helps us sympathize with them, feel for them.  But that connection to Elphaba was always cut just a little short.  I found myself thinking I should feel for her – but no matter how intimate or provoking the circumstances, the emotions that should suitably follow were never allowed to fully develop.  There was always a detachment.  I’m not sure if Maguire meant it to be this way, but it made for a very different reading experience.

Overall I think I enjoyed this book.  I say “think” because the story was interesting and the perspective, the characters and the story-telling were very original.  It definitely lived up to my expectations for trying something outside of my usual genre box.  I was, however, glad to get my nose back into a historical novel.  Perhaps the old adage is true for books as well as love (and why not, for those who have a love of books): absence indeed makes the heart grow fonder.

The Boleyn Inheritance by Philippa Gregory

I am a Henry VIII junkie, so when my boss loaned me her copy of The Boleyn Inheritance, I gobbled it up in no time.  This novel is brilliant because it tells the tale of Henry’s fourth and fifth wives from the point of view of three different women: Anne of Cleves, Henry’s fourth wife, Katheryn Howard the fifth wife, and Jane Rochford, the wife of Anne Boleyn’s brother.  The story is not told in traditional form, but in fictional letters written by each of these women.  If you don’t know much about the Henry VIII saga in British history, here it is in short.

In 1509, at 17 years of age, Henry married the Spanish princess Catherine of Aragon, the young devout Catholic widow of his late brother.  After 24 years of marriage to Catherine (with many affairs along the way) he met Anne Boleyn and fell into a reckless obsession with her.  He chased her for 8 years, but she would not be his mistress unless he divorced Catherine and married her, making her Queen of England.  For several years Henry worked viciously to divorce Catherine.  The Great Matter, as it was called, involved all his court, the heads of several other countries, the Holy Roman Empire and the Pope himself. The upheaval it caused in Britain would change the course of European history for centuries. Finally, on what is believed to be false accusations regarding Catherine’s virginity when she married Henry, he divorced her and married Anne.  Henry and Anne’s marriage lasted about 3 years.  From the start other upper-class families competing with the Boleyns for power and those who opposed Anne’s revolutionary Protestant thinking began to plot her demise.  Ultimately, it was her failure to bear Henry a son and Henry’s new interest in the young Jane Seymour that became her undoing.  With Henry’s signature and many false accusations against her (amongst which were numerous affairs with men including her brother) Henry’s great love was tried and beheaded.  The next day he became engaged to Jane, who died in childbirth not long after.  Henry went several years without marrying again, until his chief minister suggested he take Anne of Cleves, a German noblewoman, for his wife for political reasons.  This is where The Boleyn Inheritance begins.

Usually it is Anne Boleyn who gets all the attention in the Henry VIII story because of all the political drama and intrigue surrounding her fall.  However, this novel focuses on the lives of those who survive Anne, each of whom inherit something of her life and her death.  Unfortunately, only one of them survives Henry’s increasingly mad and violent temperament.  Going beyond historical fact alone, Gregory explores the motives, emotions and inner lives of the later wives and those involved in the constant struggle for power.  Not everything in this novel is hisorically accurate, but part of the fun of historical novels is the embellishments that create a vividly dramatic tale.  That’s not to say that the actual King Henry VIII didn’t supply plenty of real-life drama for everyone.  If you don’t know much about his life, check it out.  It’s a wild ride and it’s all true!

This sounds like a good afternoon to me: you make your favorite hot beverage, you fluff the pillows on the couch, curl up and pull the softest blanket you have up around your chin.  You sip and savor the warmth and all that wonderful comfort.  And then you open the cover of a really good book and dive in.  You plunge into the pages of a great story and lose yourself in vivid characters and exciting new places.

There are several books that I have enjoyed this way.  Saturdays were spent holed up indoors and evenings after work required dinner and a book instead of dinner and a movie.  These were the books I just could not put down until it was well past bedtime and my eyes refused to stay in focus long enough to catch another word.  I’ll tell you about them sporadically, but for now, let’s start with this one.

The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley

This is a huge book, but I was easily caught up in the Arthurian legend that spanned the lifetimes of several generations of characters.  (This was a blessing since I read most of it on a 9-hour-long flight to Hawaii.)  I love stories that follow a character throughout their life so they begin to feel like an old friend.  The story focuses on Morgaine (Morgan La Fey) of Avalon, a priestess in a lifelong battle to save her fading matriarchal Celtic culture as Christianity’s patriarchal influence spreads over Great Britain.  As King Arthur’s sister, Morgaine fights to remind him of his own heritage in the old ways, but Arthur’s love for his Queen, Gwenhwyfar (Guinevere), a devout follower of the new religion, and his desire to make her happy fuel his every decision. Gwenhwyfar, unable to produce and heir or be with her true love, Lancelet, becomes increasingly depressed and fanatical about her religion, pushing Arthur to completely abandon the old pagan culture.  The battle between Avalon and Camelot culminates in the birth and rise to power of Mordred, bastard son of King Arthur and Morgaine, conceived during a pagan ritual where neither knew who the other was.   Mordred is bent on reinstating the power of Avalon no matter what the cost and in the final battle, his armies line the field to face his father’s.  The story is captivating with rich detail of the inner lives of each character.  Although women are often marginalized in Camelot, it is in fact the women in this story who, from behind the scenes, shape the history of Avalon, Camelot and Great Britain.  This book can be intimidating because it is so long, and you might need a dictionary now and then, but I really enjoyed it.  It’s one of those books I will probably pick up and read again some day.