Middlemarch

Middlemarch, by George Eliot

Marriage can murder

Fortunes and dash youthful hopes.

Or it can save them.

Another novel that students of literature are encouraged to read at a time in their lives when it would frustrate rather than delight, Middlemarch is often seen as the lumpy, worthy bedrock of English novels. Solid, fair and philosophically intriguing it may be, but it lacks the sex and murder factor. It deals brazenly with adultery in the form of Rosamund's affair with Ladislaw, but it's no Madame Bovary. A hated character dies in suspicious circumstances, yet it's no Crime and Punishment.

What is it then? Well, Virginia Woolf summed it up (and imprisoned the book in the process) by pronouncing Middlemarch "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people”. And indeed it is. Its central theme is one of making do. As central characters, Dorothea and Lydgate both make bad decisions and have to live with the consequences. In Middlemarch, great plans do not come to fruition, and great energy is channelled into many small exploits instead of magnificent projects.

Perhaps what Virginia Woolf meant (and if only she could write as clearly as she thought - then maybe her novels wouldn't be so fanciful) is that as growing up means accepting that life isn't what you expected it to be. Middlemarch is an experience in triumphs taking their place alongside small and cumulative disappointments.

Sad, but true. Thanks George. 

Happy Hallowe'en - it's Dracula

Dracula, by Bram Stoker

This immortality 

Is tombed in airless parlours.

And his blood is dust.

It's Hallowe'en today. In celebration, droves of children will be dressed as undead revenants and go from door to door demanding processed sugar from householders at knifepoint.

(Forgive me my paranoia, I'm going to a fancy dress party in Brixton this evening. I'm planning on going as a stab victim in the hope that if the party is crashed, I can play dead in the hope that the marauders will think I've already been 'taken care' of.)

And since it is the 'Day of the Dead', what other book can we microblog other than, Dracula. The novel, written by Henry Irving's (the Laurence Olivier of his day) agent, Bram Stoker that has spawned an entire genre of gothic fiction that wraps bloodsucking around the familiar themes of sex and death.

Such a pity it's a bit shit.

Dracula's a loaded term now. Most readers come to it (or him, as the 'Count' as a character is a cultural colossus far bigger than the actual book) through its depiction in films, TV series, computer games or even Sesame Street. All of which piques the anticipation of a first-time reader. "This must be a classic. This is where it began."

Instead we are served up a second-rate epistolary novel with muddled themes, leaden prose and a titanic villain pushed to the sidelines of the action by cackhanded use of form. It's also hilarious to read from a feminist perspective: libertine bloodsucking lesbians, pretty girls turned to sensuous revenants, and the 'anti-feminist' heroine saved by her own stiffnecked piousness.

No wonder Francis Ford Coppola felt compelled to sex it up in his own interpretation of the book, which sadly suffered from a cast of 'mortals' whose acting styles seem a little bit undead anyway. Keanu Reeves, Winona Ryder and Sadie Frost anyone?

So, bringing Hallowe'en week to a close, here's one of the best creepy-themed novelty songs of all time. The Monster Mash.

The Lady is a Vamp

Carmilla - Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

Her lusciousness

Is dust, but does Carmilla’s

Light step haunt the stair?

Predating Dracula by a good twenty years, Carmilla is a vampire novella with a titular vamp and a fine line in stifled, bosom heaving Victorian eroticism. It's also a much better novel than its more famous successor (which is being microblogged tomorrow), evoking the quasi-erotic relationship between vampire and victim through prose that is neither lumpen nor leaden.

It's also an entertaining read if you like stories about attractive women in big skirts basically lezzing off with one another. For an insight into the 'horrific' power of deviant sexual attraction, there are few better places to go than a Victorian ghost story. All that (menstrual?) blood, white flesh and swooning - it's Freud's theory of sublimation in action. And a whole lot of Jung's anima/animus theory too, if you can be bothered unpicking that.

Le Fanu was an enormously successful writer of high-class schlocky fiction in his day (a bit of a Stephen King). Quite why he's faded into comparative obscurity while Stoker's yawnfest, Dracula, has become an unchallenged classic is beyond me, but that's luck for you.

And just because we couldn't resist it, here's Grace Jones vamping it up as an, erm, vampire (or should that be camp-ire?)

Hallowe'en - Part One

The second part of a our Hallowe'en special. Creepy classics condensed into seventeen syllables. This time around, "The Master's" attempt at writing an M.R. James-style spine chiller.

The Turn of the Screw - by Henry James

She sees corruption

Haunt what should be innocence.

But does she? Does she?

I'll be honest here: Henry James and I have never got on. It has something to do with his prose style, which has always struck me as being soporific and prissy. It often feels as though he's holding his prose at arm's length, faintly disgusted by the desires and ideas it contains. 

Naturally there's little in the way of action, though plenty if you're content with knowing looks and value judgments on the characters of minor noblewomen.

Still, The Turn of the Screw is genuinely creepy in a slow build way. And James wasn't the brother of William James, one of the 19th century's most eminent psychologists, for nothing. He understood that suggestion is much more frightening than any number of fangs dripping gore. Even better, it brought us an undisputable classic: The Innocents.

The Innocents - starring Deborah Kerr

Starting early for Hallowe'en

There's a nip in the air, pumpkins in the shops, the terrifying thought of another Republican administration in the White House...

You can tell it's October.

Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley

Animating cold clay

Churns life and death together.

Father, child, monster.

And because you can never have enough Kate Bush, here's her take on getting those autumnal creeps in Hammer Horror.

Tess of the D'Urbervilles

Tess of the D’Urbervilles, by Thomas Hardy

‘Does no mean no, Tess?’
Said Alec in the Chase that
Brought both sides to blows.

Was Tess raped, or did she submit willingly? Does it matter at all, if we consider that one of Hardy's greatest achievements as a novelist was to create characters who could lead sensual and moral lives at the same time. Tess is a fleshy character - her body is more important than her mind, because that's what life expects from her. Berating her (or Hardy) for her being so passive is like criticising a Roman doctor for not knowing about antibiotics. Is it truthful, in the terms of the novel, to expect a milkmaid to be assertive?

No.

She's not a Destiny's Child, she's a child of destiny. Ho ho ho. Her fate lies not so much in her own character as in her inability to step outside her role within society.

Hardy's later work (notably The Mayor of Casterbridge or The Woodlanders) deals with this more effectively by making the novel's tragedy come from within rather than without the main characters. Sensuality v Victorian conformity = tragedy, with society winning out over the individual. 

A bit like Hardy's own career really.

It also explains why, a few chocolate box adaptations aside, we seem to have brushed Hardy under the same carpet as DH Lawrence. We just can't imagine why sex causes his characters so much pain. 

Sex kills though.  Just take Joni's word for it.