With the BFG Movie Coming and All

In honor of a very special day, I thought I'd revive this old post about a book I found, um, intriguing, with some interesting asides (see below!).

My first thought as I read this book was Wow! Dahl is on LSD! Which makes sense for a book published in the 80s (is Dahl a child of the 60s/70s?). But no, he wasn't on psychotropic drugs. The book is Freud and Jung with a dash of Platonic forms. That says it all, doesn't it?

Ok, on to at least one real thought: BFG’s fabulous voice of made-up words, rhythm and bizarre syntax that never muddles meaning makes the book vivid and real, and surprisingly easy to read. Logic, however, seems a non-essential factor in this book, and in fantasy for this age in general. Example: the BFG can’t understand the natterbox spiders (he doesn’t know the language), but he can understand the chatbag cattypiddlers. Um. Why? Not that I really care because, hello, natterbox spiders and chatbag cattypiddlers are just too freaking awesome.

Yet I can’t get away from a Freudian reading of this book. Case in point, the giants have these frankfurter lips, right? And we all know what hot dogs represent... And they have this slimy drool, and little Sophie ends up in a giant cucumber-like (phallic much?) vegetable and is then taken into the giant’s mouth ... Yes, yes, I know. A stretch. It’s just creepy to me, like the author is subconsciously working through some latent memories he can't make sense of. Anyway, enough of that. Now for additional disjointed and seemingly random thoughts:

I love how the BFG is so childlike while the giants are rather obviously bullies, though the “message” is a little too heavy-handed for me, and a wee wittle one-sided. There's a line about human beans (yes, beans) being the only ones that kill their own kind, which isn’t true at all. I had enough hamsters as a child to know they often kill one another, and they eat their young (or in the case of Peaches, half of one of her young. The other half she left for me to find). On that note, I was a little annoyed by the social commentary. It seems the book was half parody (jack and the beanstalk references), half fantasy, and half cultural critique (yes, I know my halves don’t add up). Yet even with all the talk of how human beans kill one another, the giants (only doing what comes naturally to themselves, unlike the awful humans) get a pretty severe punishment. 

Moving on: Stephen King wrote somewhere that horror is having people react in expected ways to unexpected events. Here a giant meets real England and a table is made for him of grandfather clocks and a ping pong table. Dahl gives great authenticating details of the butler needing a ladder to set the table, it taking four footmen to carry the clocks, and so on. Such great humor here, and the fart jokes, and by the bellypoppers and portedos. I’m laughing aloud. In public. People are looking at me. 

On the downside, it took to page 118 (Sophie trying to save the school kids) for there to be strong forward motion. The plot was muddled throughout and not tied up too neatly at the end. Maybe because the whole thing is just some Jungian shared dream? It was all Dahl’s dream, obviously, since he is the BFG who, we discover at the end, is writing the story. Obviously, right? RIGHT? 

So although I found the book creepily Freudian/Jungian, and although I did enjoy the wild creativity and fun use of language, I do hope Dahl got himself some good psychotherapy. 

As an aside, I loved the bit about why there are blank pages at the back of an atlas—to draw the places no one has ever been. Isn’t that a metaphor for writing? And for life itself? 

A second aside: Dahl and I share a birthday! Which just so happens to be TODAY! Happy birthday to us!

Third aside: affiliate link up there, yo. 

Is Grimms' "The Death of the Hen" about The Black Death?

The Grimms recorded “The Death of the Hen” with the Audience/Purpose of preserving their German culture. With this in mind, the tale can be read as a morality tale (greed causes downfall) or a tale of death and dying (all die in the end). Yet neither reading explains the more bizarre story elements. If we consider that these stories were handed down orally through generations, we glimpse another Audience/Purpose.

A close study of the text provides clues to a possible original Audience/Purpose: memorializing the Black Death.

First is the brook’s centrality: Water frequently represents the passage from this life to the next, so the brook becomes a door of sorts. When it demands red silk, we might dig down to correlate the silk with the red cross that was painted on plague victims’ doors.

Likewise, we might see the wreath caught in a willow as a representation of Shakespeare’s willow: “the tree of forsaken love” and the traditional bridal wreath: symbol of memory and purity. Both may represent the hen’s promise to the cock, and her grief at violating that promise.

In the end, straw, coal, and rock all fail to save the animals. Reading with an eye to meaning: Bundles of straw were placed at the door of plague victims, so straw promulgates death. Bodies were often burned, so coal is powerless over death. And the impenetrable rock does not even have power over the Black Death.

Other versions of the tale exist, some less in line with this suggested reading. However in one telling, after all the animals board the cart, a flea assures the group that his weight will be no trouble. Yet he causes the cart’s collapse. Interestingly, fleas spread the plague.

This troubling story seems confusing when applied to the Grimms’ Audience/Purpose, but when read with other Audiences/Purposes in mind, it takes on rich new meaning.

[I read the Crane translation, and initially wrote this little blurb for a Coursera class.]

Sites consulted:

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2012/07/23/120723crbo_books_acocella

http://www.project-hamlet.info/scenes-soliloquies/muddy-death.html

http://www.surlalunefairytales.com/authors/grimms/80deathlittlehen.html

Coursera Sci-fi and Fantasy: Unit I The Brothers Grimm

And are they ever Grim! One of the very first stories in the Crane translation was, "Death of the Hen" in which everyone died in the end. As someone pointed out in the class forum, it's like Hamlet with fowl.

For some reason this story stuck in my craw (har har!). So I decided I'd look into it a bit more and write my first paper about it. Yup, this online class through Coursera (ultimately through University of Michigan), Fantasy and Science Fiction: The Human Mind, Our Modern World, requires papers. 270-320 words on every unit, one unit per week. FUN! (No, I'm not being sarcastic.)

The paper isn't due until tomorrow, so I have ample time to change my mind. Because, truly, I could write a whole BOOK on Grimms' stories. Every one of them has some fabulous little nugget - about writing, wisdom, history, the nature of story and its role in human development, on and on.

A Compass of Gold, off to a Good Start

The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman.

The power of a great opening: Pullman’s The Golden Compass begins, “Lyra and her daemon moved through the darkening hall, taking care to keep to one side, out of sight of the kitchen.” We see a bit of each method of creating conflict. We know Lyra only by name, but it’s a lovely name, likeable and not quite ordinary. We sense that Lyra is also a likeable and not quite ordinary girl. The hook in this case involves action—Lyra is sneaking around in the dark—which provides obvious mystery: why is she sneaking? What on earth is a daemon? Pullman makes us wait.

Pullman continues to keep us waiting. He follows his opening line with a smidge of description—Lyra lives in a fancy place—and then provides a glimpse into Lyra’s character when she taps crystal to hear it ring. She’s curious and playful, yet her response to her worrywart daemon of, “They’re making too much noise to hear from the kitchen,” shows Lyra as a sensible, independent girl.

In effect, we are dumped straight into the action in a strange world. Lyra snoops where girls aren’t allowed, but before our curiosity about Lyra and her world can be sated, she must duck into hiding to avoid detection. Yet more questions arise as she overhears a plot to murder her uncle. Lyra’s character has heart, we have ample hook to propel us forward, and Pullman gives us abundant mystery. If we want answers, we must read on.

The end of the book continues with questions. Lyra rescues a group of children, but the story continues into the next book. Of the three, I thought the first two fit together best. The whole world of the dead/souls/something like that in the third was bizarre and hard to follow.

The Gift of Suffering

The Giver by Lois Lowry. 1993.

Lowry opens The Giver with a description of fear and immediately cements the unusualness of the world she’s created as well as giving us insight into the young protagonist, Jonas. She also is so deliciously good at creating a Utopia that seems wonderful, at the start, and only slowly becomes sinister. It’s not at all obvious, unlike, say, Wrinkle in Time, that this Community is full of darkness. Especially chilling is the parallel between Lowry’s Community and that created in Hitler Youth.

• Emotions are real and honest. I think it was Stephen King who wrote that the key to creating fear was to let characters respond in a realistic way to unrealistic situations (something like that). Lowry does exactly that. Jonas has the same doubts and confusions any of us would have given his situation, which makes the story all the more believable.
• Last residency some of us were discussing the ending, some saying that Lowry was shocked that anyone thought Jonas and Gabe died in the snow. They’re riding down to an “Elsewhere that held their future and their past.” Throughout, Elsewhere has been the place people go when they’re released. I.e., when they die. So where else but into death was Jonas headed? I always assumed the boys died. Yet reading the book again, I see the ambiguity. My only point is that clarity would have been far, far more satisfying. I spent 10+ years being disappointed and peeved by the end to the book, while now I’m just bewildered.

Secrets, Platforms, Bizarre Britishisms

The Secret of Platform 13 by Eva Ibbotson. Dutton, 1994.

Rich and fun fantasy. Ibbotson starts off with quaint Brittishisms, ghosts, and secret doors to other worlds. What’s not to love? Loads of fantastical invention and a heavy dose of political correctness. Atmospheric with a distant 3rd person narrator, similar in voice to others like Charlotte’s Web, Tuck Everlasting, a storybook voice that’s lolling and gentle, saying “come along for a story, children.”

• There’s no mad rush to get the action going at the start. Too bad children are so impatient and discriminating that they won’t bother with such a slow beginning (note sarcasm). In my experience, children are far more tolerant of lousy writing/boring books than adults. Not that this is lousy or boring. Much to the contrary.
• Wonderful use of jump cuts/scene breaks and such, and phrases like pancakes “warm as puppies,” make me salivate. 
• A strange, Dursley-like character (Harry Potter). 
• Deft use of POV. Note the selection from pp. 91-92: We were in a rather distant 3rd narration, then a new paragraph, “Raymond was still staring at the little creature. No one at school had anything like that. He’d be able to show it off to everyone. Paul had a tree frog and Derek had a grass snake, but this would beat them all.” Clearly diving into Raymond’s head, then pulling back out again with the voice of another character speaking. 
• Handbags of Harpies. HA! And the various scenes weave together brilliantly. Mrs. T’s perfume down the drain giving away her location, etc. All around fun!

Classics of Moles and Rats

The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame. 1908.

So Pooh-like with that quaint voice and silly words and lots of happy adverbs (see, sometimes adverbs can be good!). Mole meanders aimlessly and is bewitched, entranced, fascinated by a bubbling, gurgling, chuckling river. What wonderful words! Never mind that Moles are blind; I could eat it up.

I was more than a little shocked to read Rat’s line, “Stop it, you silly ass!” on page 17, however.

Despite the lovely turns of phrase and the appeal of classic literature, I don’t favor talking animal stories. I’ve started and stopped this one every few months since entering the program (not to mention the times I’ve tried to read it in previous years). I’m just not a child at heart, I suppose. I did glimpse an interesting parallel to some of these characters and Tolkien’s Hobbits—maybe this was a source of inspiration for Tolkien, or just a similarity because of the tone, but the homey little Mole is rather Hobbit-like, and his crusty friends reminiscent of Frodo’s mishmash of companions.

Rats of NIMH and other Rodent Themed Books

Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH by Robert C. O'Brien. 1971.

There’s a certain sameness to rodent-themed books, I’ve noticed. Velveteen Rabbit (ok, not quite, but ...), Ralph and the Motorcycle, Borrowers. Most have a lot of “critter skittering about for food” along with lots of scurrying, scraping and scampering. This one is the same, and the anthropomorphism (done well) is the hook here. On page 21 we get a description of Dragon, the cat: “He was enormous, with a huge, broad head and large mouth full of curving fangs, needle sharp.” Vivid, as a cat would be to a mouse, then the monstrous and mythical take over, “He had seven claws on each foot and a thick, furry tail, which lashed angrily from side to side.” Other thoughts—

• Honor and respect are heavy themes. In the first scene with the crow, throughout. The nature of true nobility. And a great quote from p. 32, “All doors are hard to unlock until you have the key.” 
• Little details like the smell of frost melting make the reading delightful. Twists and turns in plot too, like the drugged cat, the backstory, overhearing the family planning to poison the rats. There’s adventure and death/violence on a level that would not be possible for this age group with human characters.

A Spider and a Pig

Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White. 1952.

Similar in voice to Babbitt’s Tuck Everlasting, White’s is written in a pleasantly distant third person with an air of mystery, like the story that is unfolding is Very Important. Some things of note:

• It opens with dialogue, which pulls the reader in immediately. Uncommon for the times, I think?
• It confronts death quite realistically and without squeamishness. Yes, pigs become bacon and Christmas ham. Yet one pig will be spared.
• A strong sense of sentimentality runs throughout. Sort of like Charlotte’s character herself.

Total aside: I played Fern in my fourth grade production of Charlotte's Web. I had to sing to a stuffed pig, and during dress rehearsal I went missing for a few minutes, so the Green-Room-Nazi-Mom kept a strict eye on me. She made me miss an entrance during the performance because she didn't believe me when I said I needed to be on stage. Funny what odd details make an impression.

I also had to kiss Wilbur (John VanDop, who I loved desperately) on his sweet little head at the end. I'm so glad he wasn't turned into bacon!

Bizarre Title Day: The Book of Three

The Book of Three by Lloyd Alexander. 1964.

The heavy info-drop at the start of this book made me put it aside several times. The only reason I plugged ahead was because I had to complete this list!

I’m mixed. On one had the action is compelling and well-done and the plot moves fairly smoothly (i.e., not the “video game” plotline present in so many fantasy novels—like “we must rescue the enchantress but first we need the magic key but to get the magic key we must defeat the octagonal ogre but to defeat the octagonal ogre we need a dragon’s egg that can only be had as reward for aiding the chicken in his quest to cross the road!”). The similarities to Tolkien (The Hobbit published in 1937) were striking. A Gollum-like creature (Gurgi), and Taran is Sam to Gwydion’s Frodo for a good bit of the beginning. Yet this one is very much more, ahem, feminist than Tolkien. The female has a speaking role! And doesn’t end up embracing domesticity at the end (though maybe she will in future books. It’s still incredible, especially for the early ‘60s). And the plot takes many fascinating, unexpected, and un-Tolkien-like turns.

So, in short, I didn’t appreciate the info-dump at the head, as mentioned, nor the summing-up at the end. But both were far and away less tedious than Tolkien’s councils of Elrond and the like. Some notes on content:

• Taran’s move from Assistant Pig Keeper to hero is believable and subtle—nicely done. An especially poignant passage on p119, “To him, the bright morning felt deceptively gentle; the golden trees seemed to cover dark shadows. He shuddered even in the warmth.” He’s seeing with new eyes, growing, changing.
• But all this to-do over an ocular pig? Tolkien never had to argue the Ents into existence, nor Hobbits, but grown men seeking divination from a sow ... I needed some convincing that I never received.

One Bizarre Book: The BFG by Roald Dahl

The BFG by Roald Dahl. FS&G, 1982.

My first thought: wow! Dahl is on LSD! Which makes sense for an early 80s book (child of the 60s/70s). But no, not psychotropic drugs, just a little Freud and Jung with a dash of Platonic forms. Ok, on to at least one real thought: BFG’s fabulous voice of made-up words, rhythm and bizarre syntax that never muddles meaning. It is so vivid and real, and so surprisingly easy to read. But logic seems a non-essential factor in fantasy for this age. The BFG can’t understand the natterbox spiders (doesn’t know the language), but he can understand the chatbag cattypiddlers? Why?

• Yet I can’t get away from a Freudian reading of this book. The giants have frankfurter lips (and we all know what hot dogs represent), with slimy drool, and little Sophie ends up in a giant cucumber-like (oh-so-phallic) vegetable and is then taken into the giant’s mouth ... yes, yes, I know. It’s just creepy to me, like it’s some latent memory the author hasn’t yet come to terms with. 
• I love how the BFG is so childlike while the giants are rather obviously bullies. Though the “message” was a little heavy-handed. There is a line about human beans being the only ones that kill their own kind, which isn’t true at all. I had enough hamsters as a child to know they often kill one another, and they eat their young (or in the case of Peaches, half of one of her young. The other half she left for me to find). On that note, I was a little annoyed by the social commentary. It seems the book was half parody (jack and the beanstalk references), half fantasy, and half cultural critique (yes, I know my halves don’t add up). Yet even with all the talk of how human beans kill one another, the giants (only doing what comes naturally to themselves, unlike the awful humans) get a pretty severe punishment. 
• Stephen King wrote somewhere that horror is having people react in expected ways to unexpected events—here a giant meets real England and a table is made for him of grandfather clocks and a ping pong table. Dahl gives great authenticating details of the butler needing a ladder to set the table, it taking four footmen to carry the clocks, and so on. Such great humor here, and the fart jokes, and by the bellypoppers and portedos I’m laughing aloud. 
• I loved the bit on p.196 about blank pages at the back of an atlas—to draw the places no one has ever been. Isn’t that a metaphor for writing? And life itself? 
• On the downside, it took to page 118 (Sophie trying to save the school kids, which she didn’t actually do!) for there to be strong forward motion. The plot was a little muddled and not tied up too neatly at the end. Maybe because the whole thing is just some Jungian shared dream? It was all Dahl’s dream, obviously, since he is the BFG who, we discover at the end, is writing the story. So although I found the book creepily Freudian/Jungian, and although I did enjoy the wild creativity and fun use of language, I do hope Dahl got himself some good psychotherapy. 

Another Take on Princesses

Princess Academy by Shannon Hale. Bloomsbury, 2005.

A lovely, character-driven plot with lots of twist and surprises. I haven’t read a Newbery fantasy like this since The Blue Sword/Hero and the Crown. There’s a strong (contemporary) emphasis on justice and diplomacy, but I found it odd that the prince did not marry a mountain girl. I suppose that’d be a whole different story, but for all the societal attitudes against mountain people, the solution of sneaking a non-mountain girl into the Princess Academy seemed to only prove that yes, the snooty city folk are right, a mountain girl never could be queen.

• The writing is delicious and poetic. Some distance between the narrator (she’s not very poetic), but less than in Midwife’s Apprentice. It works.
• I would have liked more setting. It’s cloudy and indistinct to me. I see Linder, but the houses and the peoples’ daily lives ... they’re so organized yet so naive. Uneducated yet peaceful, and wise enough to be open to new ideas. It’s just too Utopian to be believed.
• The subplot of the protagonist feeling useless is stated but never shown in a truly convincing way.

When Books Become Films

Last night I popped in the latest arrival from Netfix, the movie adaptation of Christopher Paulini's Eragon. I was so excited - a chance to lose myself in a great epic fantasy, like Lord of the Rings which I could read or watch a thousand times and never find boring. And since Eragon has been compared to LOTR many times (though mostly with the word "pilfer" somewhere in the sentence), I was expecting great things.

My husband and I like to predict whether a film will be any good during the opening credits. Actually, it's mostly my husband who likes to do this, and I like to say, "Just watch the movie!" and then to gloat (in a mature way, of course) when a flick he said would be awful is actually good. Especially if it was my pick and not his.

But this time I couldn't help but join in the prediction game. When a film opens with a tawny-headed Hobbit frolicking in the woodlands it's quaint and endearing. But the tawny Ed Speleers, the 17-year-old slightly petulant, thoroughly milk-toast Eragon? Not so much.



By the arrival of the dragon egg, Stephen and I were cracking jokes, "No! Take the red pill the red one! Don't take the blue pill!" (Sorry, forgive my Honey I Shrunk the Kids meets The Matrixmoment there.)

Once the rubbery baby dragon started devouring rats, we were switching to our one clear television channel to see when 20/20 would be finished with the un-viewable segment on some man who murdered his children but kept the love of his wife. So for another half-hour we flipped. The dragon is telepathic! switch The woman forgave him. switch The evil king is John Malkovich! switch Creepy music and, "Mania and depression can be a murderous combination..." switch Is that a dragon or a giant rubber chicken that's been painted blue? switch So call your doctor about Galbatorix. May cause stomach upset, diarrhea, and incandescent glowing of the eyeballs. Oh, good, the segment's over.

Usually I like to read a book before I watch a movie. I saw Lemony Snicket first (and loved it) but found it was just too close to the books for me to read them - too redundant. I was so disappointed; they're such smart and funny books. But here, regardless of how different the book may be, I no longer feel compelled to read it, and given it's door-stop proportions, this is about two week's reading I may now spend on other things. Bonus for me!