Love in a Cold Climate, Nancy Mitford

Just before I launch into my usually half mad rantings about apocalyptic robot wars, an interesting fact about Nancy Mitford: "Nancy Mitford is from one of the most interesting families EVER TO HAVE EXISTED." Some pedantic and annoying individuals may claim this statement to be entirely subjective, to them I say, only foolish loons think that Nancy Mitford's family ISN'T crazy interesting, therefore your opinions are rendered null and void by the law of me.

Upon what have I based such knowledge? Where any garden variety oracle gathers knowledge from! I once read an article in in Marie Claire about her and then followed that up by a good ol' romp around Wikipedia. Woo! According to such, Nancy Mitford wrote some pretty famous books (duh) and had TWO sisters who were facist chums of Hitler himself. THEN Unity Mitford, having some weird obsession with Hitler (that's not just my bizarre rhetoric, she actually had some kind of stalkery obsession and used to sit at his feet like a dog. Also her middle name was "Valkyrie" of which I can't ascertain whether she was named that at birth or whether there was some kind of freaky renaming ceremony later on...) shot herself in the head upon England's declaration of war BUT THEN MANAGED TO LIVE ANOTHER TEN YEARS. Not only was she a psycho fascist loon, she was a MEDICAL MARVEL. I bet she had a million and one seizures after that. Fascinating. Oh yeah, also there was another sister who was a communist thrown in for good measure, but I can't be bothered researching her- that's quite enough Mitford drama for one post.

Moving right along.

So the book I've been reading lately in order to distract myself from impending doom (it comes in so many forms these days) is "Love In A Cold Climate." Which, despite reminding me of "Love In the Time Of Cholera" (a book i DISLIKED INTENSELY for the record), actually is nothing at all in common with that little HORRIFYING GLIMPSE INTO OLD PEOPLE LOVE (that's what Love in the Time of Cholera is about- old people. Getting. It. On). In fact, the story goes a little like this.

The heroine of this story is shy and frumpy. She has hair like a mop and her mother is a transatlantic whore. She (the mother), is referred to throughout the book as The Bolter, because she bolts away from men and is generally too free with her favours- a massive no-no in 1920's England. Her father, also quite skanky, never makes an appearance in the book because he's busy floozy-ing about in Jamaica. Meanwhile, the Frumpy Girl has a friend who lives in a mansion who is both angelically beautiful and entirely vacuous. Vacuous Girl doesnt really have much of a personality- the author alludes to the fact that she has, dozens of times actually, but from what I can gather she is merely a sack of attractive potatoes. Mm. Potatoes.

Vacuous Girl has an overbearing bitch face of a mother who, when Vacuous Girl reaches 20, FREAKS OUT because her daughter isn't married. She starts wheeling and dealing about the place, trying to maneuver a match out of anyone for the love of god, because according to basically every character in the book, women need to be married to find true happiness. Any ailment that befalls and unmarried woman is clearly due to the fact that she has outgrown her virginity and thus needs a ring and a baby. Lost a limb? Typhoid fever? Leprosy? Get a baby in ya! You're a schizophrenic leprechaun with a harelip? Nothing cures leprechaun-ism better than a tumble amongst the hay bales. Ah yes. Patriarchal goodness.

Things take a for the worst when FRUMPY GIRL GETS MARRIED BEFORE VACUOUS GIRL. It's shocking I know. The basic statues of Natural Selection dictate clearly that fitter (read more attractive) people should not be upstaged by freaky little mop heads. Everyone spends the rest of the book wondering who on earth would want to marry such a "queer little creature" and lamenting the fact that she's married a "queer man" who likes "fiddling about with books". Oh 1920s, how I love thee. SUDDENLY the next shocking announcement is announced; Vacuous Girl, in a fit of virginal insanity, decides she wants to marry her uncle. Uncle by marriage, but her uncle nonetheless. Then there's a few chapters of everyone wailing and seizing about in corridors. The uncle is actually an ex-lover of the mother. This shit is gettin' freaky yo. Maybe the uncle has read that Neil Strauss book, "The Game" and learned himself some mad skillz in the art of picking up. It hints to me at this point that the Bold and the Beautiful may have borrowed a storyline from this book and just added a pool cleaner and a goat. The similarities are astounding.

My take on incestuous virginal revenge turned marriage? I quite enjoyed this book. The overbearing bitch face mother spends the entire novel flouncing about- and you know how much I like a good flounce. In terms of scoring? It's just like reading a Mills and Boon, but because it's old you can pretend you're reading something intelligent. If I were you I'd try and pass Nancy Mitford as a post feminist commenter on social theory, but that's me.

Love in a Cold Climate, Nancy Mitford; Vintage; Vintage Books ed., 2001

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, Stieg Larsson

I met this little number a while back for my birthday - or maybe Christmas actually hold on.... "To our dear Cait-... er I mean, To our dear Mrs Whittleby, Wishing you a very happy birthday and many happy returns, Love from Mummy and Daddy xx" Yep. Tharr be a birthday book. Mon Maman, la bibliothecaire - LIBRARIAN YOU PHILISTINE (and yes i can't work out how to do a stupid acute accent on this thing so for people out there who are SMARTY PANTSes, i am aware. shut your face.) picked this one out pour moi.

I actually quite enjoyed this book. Though let me say that I "quite enjoyed" all the other books I've reviewed so far- so let us all keep in mind that simply "liking" something has never diverted my attention from tearing the little bastard to shreds. And this simple philosophy I happily apply to all aspects of my life. Moving on.

The story starts out rather uninterestingly to be quite honest. Or rather, it is uninteresting for ME because I am only amused when a book contains explosions, sexual ambiguity (keeps me guessing) and tits. Oh yeah. Well not really I mean what heterosexual female wants to read about tits...actually I take that back. Tits it is. The tit-less reason I was uninterested by the beginning was because there they were just "ta-ta-ta-talkin' bout Blah, blah, blah" about industrial fraud. It was a concept I had no inclination to grasp at the time , only so much as to identify baddie versus goodie. Somehow the book then transitions into a completely unrelated crime drama. The main character- Somewhat Flawed Middle Aged Journalist (SFMAJ- pronounced as it's written) gets lured to a country estate by Eldery Decrepit (E-Dawg) in order to solve the mystery of his niece's death a million years ago in exchange for copious amounts of cash and sexual favours. So it then turns into a case not dissimilar to that crime show Cold Case but without the plastic surgery pin up girl detective. Instead there's an aspergery person (i think we're to assume she has an autism spectrum disorder) who goes about kickin' shit and doin' maths. Hardcore, baby. She's a hacker, so she's in the background just hackin' away. So SFMAJ starts investigating about. He looks at photos and just generally spends a lot of time lurking about, but all under the guise of writing E-Dawg's biography (he's like, a big deal) so that the family members WHO ARE ALL SUSPECTS don't find out and therefore gleefully pour their hearts out to complete strangers. Woo. So the crime takes hold and we spend the rest of the book romping about in the wilderness. Hacker has problems all of her own- she's been labelled by the government as mentally incapable or something and isn't allowed to have money or a job because then she might go on some sort of mental crime spree. Background is that she's apparently mentally unstable, but we actually get the impression that instead of being REALLY mentally unstable, she just had herself declared unfit for the fun of it. Hacker likes screwing with people, apparently. Hardcore.

Let's not kid ourselves. It isn't brilliant Dickenseque literature or anything of the sort. To be honest, it's another clever little Dan Brown. (Side note, I've only read 5/6th's of The Da Vinci Code. There weren't enough explosions or tits and everyone had a clearly defined gender role). But putting that unfortunate similarity aside, its a rollicking good time. It rambles about with the protagonist long enough to make you throw the book away in disgust, but is tricksy enough to make you want to pick it back up again. Then, the ending is both ludicrous and shockingly violent enough that the reader would never have been able to guess it. And I mean never, it's pretty ridiculous. In saying that, I do only feel that the ridiculous-ness is only part of it's charm, and there's a teensy part of me that believes that if the ending had been anything less than unbelievably outrageous, I would have been quite disappointed because I know this genre (trash-fiction, otherwise known as triction) and anything other than the standard plot line would have seen this book burning in little book hell. I didn't have to think too much about this one either. Unlike when I read The Good Earth, there are no lingering doubts in my mind about imagery or symbolism and I do not feel the need to whip out a text response.

In my own personal rating system I would give it a 9/10 for tram fiction and a 10/10 for blogging material but only a 1/10 for pretensious codswallop. There is, unfortunately, nothing pretensious here and you will, impress no one in stating that you've read this book. A black beret and a set of bongo drums would serve the purpose much better.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Stieg Larsson, MacLehose Press, Great Britain, 2008

The Good Earth, Pearl Buck

Haven't posted in a while, busy with having a life, one could say. However, I shall grace you with my literary insights once more in order to distract myself from the battering of my poor little car from an onslaught of golf ball sized hail stones.

The Good Earth begins with this peasant dude, Wang Lung, living in a hut, getting ready to purchase himself a wife- in much the same fashion as you would purchase other family members- pigs, dogs, cows, waterbuffalo... He heads on down to the local self styled lord and is all, "Give me a wife, yo or I'll bust a cap in yo ass". And the local lord basically goes "Fuck you mother fucker fuckety fuckety fuckety ok here's a wife." But poor little Wang Lung can't have a pretty wife because he prefers his women STD free. So he gets himself this fugly chick who is sure to be clean and surely not hymen-ly-challenged because who else is going to touch her?

Then Wang Lung and his woman (who doesn't actually have a name for half the book) have babies and sow crops for the next three hundred pages. That's basically it. Oh sure, there are some things that happen in between like, they milk a cow or they eat some tofu, but pretty much they're fully obsessed with growing shit. There's also a famine, half the family dies blahblahblah but that all pales into comparison with the fact that "look, there's a crop, oh look, now it's growing". Wang Lung sure loves his crops. His sons? Yeah, crops don't hold the same fascination for them and they run off and spend their time visiting prositutes. Then Wang Lung buys himself another wife, a local prostitute, who then gets fat and refuses to bear him any children. Sigh. The trials of women, eh? He should have given them a good ol' fashioned beating. That would have learned them. Learned them good.

Now for the part where I write from the realms of reality, go:

This book is a thinking person's book (meaning unfortunately Edward the vampire doesn't make an appearance and there's no such thing as a "babysitter" let alone a "club" in peasant-land, China). The symbolism is there, but I'm too lazy to actually work out what the symbolism stands for, so maybe y'all should just read the book and tell me all about it. I'll give you a hint: water, land, crops- they're symbols for something. I'm going to say they're symbols of post modernist oppression in a post-Stalinist era. It's very well written, interesting; both simplistic and highly complex at the same time. There was apparently a touch of controversy upon it's publication in 1931 according to Wikipedia because Pearl S. Buck isn't actually Chinese and so what the hell would she know about Asians? Then there was some other controversy because Pearl S. Buck is a whitey and therefore sneaky and a liar. Or something. Whatever it was, my opinion is that the book is actually pretty darn accurate (from what I can gather, but how inaccurate can a person be when the entire book is basically: Mr and Mrs Peasant live in a hut and grow corn and eat corn") and seeing as she grew up in China (which in itself is interesting considering the period) yeah, I think she'd have an idea.

I would recommend this book and on my own personal scaling system, I would give it a "100,000 times better than Twilight" stamp of approval. "What does that even mean?" you ask? It means reading it didn't make me want to stab my eye with a fork, and despite the fact that the Wang Lung's wife spends the entire book without any sense of identity other than as free labour and as a baby-generating machine, it is probably less degrading to women and feminism on the whole than the entire Twilight enterprise.

The End.

The Good Earth, by Pearl S. Buck, Washington Square Press, 1931

Raised By Wolves, W. A. Hoffman

Admittedly, I haven't quite finished this book yet. But I can still review it for what it is- if I for some reason decide the ending is vomit-worthy or causes me to tear my hair or cry at the utter terrible-ness, then I shall of course come back and write y'all an update. As it is....

Basically the story is this: Black Sheep Man careers about Europe and the The Empire like a cross between Indiana Jones and Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. He spends a lot of time in the opening pages musing about all the many many times he's macked on with that dude over there and over there and oh look, there's another... Then he spends another couple of pages chatting about how much he likes threesomes. So basically the scene is set. It's the seventeenth century and our dear protagonist is a MASSIVE SLUT-FACE. So then the Tramp-Skank gets on to talk about things that don't involve his member- namely how his job is something along the lines of a career criminal. The first adventure is all about how him and his Man Friend (I would say boyfriend, but he's also consequently involved with this Noble-class Hooker) devise this scheme to kill some dude and blahblahblah- it's all not overly important to the plot line and it's over and done with in twenty lines or so. BUT THEN. He has to leave Florence because he DID kill some dude and the family has become somewhat pissed about the whole shenanigan.

And so, alas, he has to leave behind his Man Friend, who apparently is some kind of Greek god, and he decides to return home to England. We learn that he left England twenty bazillion years before because his cousin raped him, but in actual fact he's the sole heir to an Earldom and some massive fortune. He gets back to England then, assuming many a fake identity along the way and meets back up with his peeps. I should also note at this point that he's quite different from the rest of the nobility, mainly because he talks a lot about the "sheep" and "wolves"; the peasants and the nobility. He's pretty much a seventeenth century communist- he believes everyone should be equal and he hates the fact that he can pop caps in gangstas' asses and get away with it and yet the peasants can't. So basically he hates power and he hates money (I know right, freak-tard).

So he gets back to England, his evil rapist cousin is trying to marry his sister, who, in actuality is a bit of a bitch anyway, so he swiftly prevents that from happening and agrees to go to Jamaica for Daddy, in order to buy enough time for Daddy to plan a dastardly end for the Rapist-Cousin. So he hops on a boat and sails about for a bit to get to Jamaica.

And I draw somewhat of an issue with the book here. By this point (ie. not that far into the book, to be honest) I'm almost getting tired of hearing about his penis. There's only so much I want to read about the adventures of a seventeenth century penis, I'd much rather read about a seventeenth century pirate guy. He talks about how he has to restrain himself from kissing the crew every five seconds and how his libido is back and how he just wants to have a good ole fashioned tumble in the hammock with half the dudes on board. Yes, I know that to get to Jamaica from England in those days it was like, five weeks stuck on a ship or something, but REALLY. Maybe because I find it difficult to relate to the protagonist, who is clearly turning out to be an absolute nympho. I don't spend my time wanting to get jiggy with anything that moves, so perhaps that's why I find it difficult to really believe this scenario.

Another issue I draw with the book, the main character is very open about being bisexual. It's not that it bothers me, its more the fact that it doesn't seem historically accurate. I always gathered from history books etc, that unless you lived in Ancient Greece or a similarly accepting culture, people probably weren't as likely to go skipping about the street telling anyone who'll listen all about how you like to fuck other men. Wouldn't there be repercussions for this in the seventeenth century? It's not that he even tells SELECT people, he basically tells anyone who'll listen. Isn't he scared of, I don't know, persecution? I suppose my main issue is that the ideals of the day don't seem to be all that well represented here, for what is an otherwise very accurate historical novel (or maybe I'm wrong- maybe it was fine to be gay in the seventeenth century I don't know).

HOWEVER on saying that, I do really like this book. I can't wait to finish it because it's actually very interesting and well written. The adventures that Slutface has are really entertaining, regardless of the endless shagging (or perhaps because of it).

Brethren: Raised By Wolves, Volume One by W. A. Hoffman, Alien Perspective (January 1st 2006)

Gone With The Wind, Margaret Mitchell

"Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn."





Oh Rhett. You had me at "Goddamnit, Scarlett you tramp-faced skank!"
And the so the book continues. At over one thousand pages, you'd better start likin' Miz Scarlett pretty darn quickly, because it's not as if she's a character who improves upon closer acquaintance.

An interesting question to ask about Gone With The Wind (which will henceforth be known as GWTW) is whether or not Scarlett O'Hara is a feminist. Does a frothed-up-trollop maketh a feminist?

The story goes thusly: Scarlett O'Hara is sixteen living in the deep South pre-civil war, and already The Grand Manipulator. She spends the first five or so chapters shaking her bosom in every direction and pouting like a constipated fish. She's only got the whole freakin' county trying to get in her corset for a little bit of jiggy jiggy, but she wants more, More, MORE! She decides, because a mere mortal man isn't enough, to deify her neighbour Ashley. (This book has ruined the name "Ashley" for me. Anyone named Ashley, male or female, whenever i meet them I just hear Scarlett's voice - Ok, so Vivien Leigh's voice- in my head shrieking over and over and over "ASHLEY! DON'T LEAVE ME!"). So Ashley becomes some kind of demi god, but upon realising Scarlett's *cough cough* "high spirited nature", decides instead to get hitched to his cousin, Melanie. Even marrying a blood relation would be better then being stuck with Scarlett for eternity, never able to escape that high pitched bimbo shriek- or so we are lead to believe. AND SO CREATETH THE TRIANGLE OF LOVE.
The story then goes on for another 900 pages or so, all about Scarlett's various schemes to steal Ashley away from Mellie Hamilton (if you ever wanted to know what a human doormat looked like, I would suggest Melanie Hamilton, bristles and all). Schemes including marrying various men and general prostituting about the town. Because nothing says "I Love You Ashley" like having another man's baby. Oh! I almost forgot, there's a war on by the way and a bunch of people die- but that of course is inconsequential compared to Oh-the-torment-Ashley-doesn't-love-me.
Although I haven't covered it yet, I feel that I should mention a certain Rhett Butler (with a name like that, how could you go wrong?) who is this dude who rocks up and is revealed to be basically Scarlett with a cock. However we all like him more, probably because he spends less time throwing The Tantrum To End All Tantrums. In the 1939 movie adaptation of GWTW, Rhett is played by Clark Gable- who, I'm sorry, does not fit the role of Rhett at all. Sure, he spends appropriate amounts of time throwing Scarlett down stairs (who wouldn't!) and hurling pottery at her head, but he's just not....Rhettish enough for me.

The verdict: GWTW reads like a soap opera. Just when you think everything's dandy, you suddenly realise that Scarlett's pool keeper is actually her illegitimate brother who in fact is now sleeping with her sister. That never happens. But I spent the over-a-thousand-pages hoping that it would. Personally, I enjoy soap operas. The book also reads in parts something like a whispery gossip conversation. It does feel on occasion that Margaret Mitchell is sharing some massive secretly gossip- another quality I do enjoy. In addition, the historical aspect is fascinating- though that of course plays a minor role to Ashley (who is, by the way, a rather insipid individual) and his various, ahem, charms.

Gone With The Wind, by Margaret Mitchell, Scribner (1st September, 1936)

Faro's Daughter, Georgette Heyer

Oh! To be a feisty young woman in a regency world, straining against the confines of lace and champagne, playing all manner of audacious pranks upon a stern, older gentleman, yet knowing all the while that Mr. Stern Older Gentleman will one day tame you, you naughty little shrew, making you his wife and teaching all us cheeky young women this valuable lesson : There is no point fighting it, you will succumb to me in the end.

I should really point out about now that I really didn't mind this book so much. True, my feminist sensitivities died a little inside- choking delightfully on a oesophagus of their own vomit, but laying that aside, it wasn't that bad. And I could, perhaps rant in a similar feminist vein about Austen.

The story is basically this: Dirty Commoner works in gaming house serving members of the ton (upper class), spending her nights drinking, giggling, dealing cards and generally sitting upon the mantelpiece as a trophy for all to admire. Dirty Commoner manages to sneakily sneak up upon noble, yet naive young man of wealth and fortune, ensnaring him with her feminine wiles. Naive Noble proposes and Dirty Commoner, who doesn't love him, or (for some bizarre feminist reason) doesn't actually want to marry at all (I know, right? What the hell is wrong with her!), decides to string him along regardless because clearly, it's no fun wiggling your rump about if no one's there to watch it. However, dun dun dunnnn - Naive Noble happens to procure himself an irascible uncle/cousin/father/thing and Stern Gentleman struggles to contain his bile at the idea of Dirty Commoner marrying Naive Noble. Will someone please think of the children!

What Stern Gentleman didn't realise, however, is that his interference would only transform Dirty Commoner from lace-on-legs (I would say tits-on-a-stick, however this is a Regency World, and as we're all aware, sex is a relatively new invention, having only been developed in the 1960's) to some kind of Sarah-Palin-in-a-corset. Nobody puts Dirty Commoner in a corner!

So naturally Stern Gentleman and Dirty Commoner engage in thinly veiled pranking war (thinly veiled because we all know they just want to get down and do the nasty) and somethingsomethingsomething everyone marries happily in the end. Oh! Was that a spoiler? This is a Georgette Heyer novel, did you really need to be told it was happily-ever-after? Pssh.

And for the grand finale? Although the book follows pretty much exactly the same pattern for every single other Georgette Heyer novel i.e. Man + Money + Woman + Extreme Loathing = Happy Marriage, the book itself has its moments. The dialogue in most Heyer novels is particularly witty, reminiscent of Austen, one could say (blasphemy?). And historically, Heyer, as always is infallibly correct. The storyline itself however, remains predictable. On saying that, however, you should probably ask yourself, does anyone ever read a Georgette Heyer looking to be shocked out of their socks? Probably not. The vast majority of Heyer fans read knowing that there will be no surprises, and therefore no possible reason to think whilst reading.

Faro's Daughter, by Georgette Heyer. Sourcebooks Casablanca; Reprint Edition (1st July, 2008)