Where a sound story is hindered by its length.

Publisher: (Numerous, but I’d wager Vintage would be a good one)
Pages: N/A
Type: Fiction
Age: Adult
ISBN: N/A
First Published: 1853
Date Reviewed: 18th February 2011
Rating: 3.5/5

Lucy Snowe leads a mundane life, looking after other people and staying with friends. When the chance to move to France presents itself, she takes it on impulse. An encounter with a fellow compatriot leads her to employment as an English teacher in the town of Villette. Lucy’s life at once goes back to monotony but it appears that one teacher may be interested in her, even if the interest seems negative.

On the whole, Villette isn’t a bad book. The story is good, and although not up to the standard of Jane Eyre, it is nevertheless enjoyable. The characters are interesting and there is a similar variety of genres used throughout, including a small mystery.

Apart from the obvious parallels that come from them sharing a creator, Lucy Snowe couldn’t be more different to Jane Eyre. Lucy, too, addresses the reader in that beautiful way Charlotte applies to her writing, drawing them into the fold as intimately as a friend, but she has none of the strengths of her predecessor. Lucy is always saying that her life is dull and thus it becomes very irritating when she turns down offers of, for example, a dance, which would make her more interesting – and then later reasserts her position as a person living a mundane existence. Lucy has every opportunity to improve herself but for most of the book she does not take it.

Unfortunately this means that the psychology Charlotte uses – the way she has Lucy often spending ages wondering on her life – doesn’t quite make the impact it should. To speak personally, I found myself happy that Lucy had learned something, thinking she would remember it for next time, and finding my hopes dashed again and again. Lucy is her own worse enemy and it is thanks to the goodness of other people that she develops later on. If left to her own devices entirely she surely would never have got anywhere.

Charlotte writes about her characters in a way unique to her. Maybe it’s in part because the length of her books allows for good development, but it’s more just the way she appropriates time. The best way to explain this would be to provide you with a quotation:

A constant crusade against the “amour-propre” of every human being but himself, was the crochet of this able, but fiery and grasping little man. He had a strong relish for public representation in his own person, but an extreme abhorrence of the like display in any other. He quelled, he kept down when he could; and when he could not, he fumed like a bottled storm.

The array of difference between all the characters is quite something. Lucy spends a lot of time thinking and shying away, whereas most of her acquaintances make nothing of sharing their feelings with everyone. A particularly fantastic character, for her distinct oppositeness to Lucy, is Ginevra Fanshawe, a girl at once annoying and yet so full of life that the reader cannot but love her as the antidote to a dull heroine.

There is a romantic element to the plot, for the most part subtle, one can never be sure if it will develop or not. And, as seems to be the norm with Victorian writers, there are a great many coincidences that make the story unfortunately less realistic.

Now there are three major bones of contention I must deal with. The first I will discuss briefly because otherwise I could end up talking on it at length.

Charlotte’s Protestantism. It becomes impossible to separate a personality from the book they have written when a lot of the work is clearly a lecture. Lucy is so vehemently against Catholicism that at times it makes the book impossible. Villette can come across as a sermon, and in suggesting it is a sermon I look to Charlotte’s situation as the daughter of a clergyman as my evidence – she would know well how to word her feelings. The hatred is just too much, Lucy goes on about how her “ears burned” as she was “forced” to listen to stories of the saints, and the silly thing about it is that in doing so and in going on about it frequently, Charlotte produces the opposite effect – indeed I felt sorry for those she scorned – and not only that, but she makes her Catholic characters, through their lesser strength of feeling for their opposites, or at least for the lesser amount of time afforded to them, the preferred group of people. Perhaps, then, it is in realisation of this, in realisation of the fact that Catholics could well be among the number of her readers, that makes Charlotte’s joining of the denominations later on through her characters, important.

The application of French. In my review of Jane Eyre I said that one could get by with a very basic knowledge of the French language; in Villette whole paragraphs are written in it and I presume that even an intermediate knowledge would not suffice. It’s odd really because Charlotte switches back and forth, during conversations, between English and French, where she could have just used English. Her method renders her work impossible to read in its entirely without knowledge of French, and therefore unless you possess it you will likely find yourself, as I did, skipping over large chunks of text, much of which it’s obvious is important to know for a clear understanding of the characters.

The last thing is the length of the book. The length is what makes it so dreary a read because there are chapters upon chapters of needless content, and although it effectively expresses Lucy’s mundane life, it makes a desire to read the book difficult to kindle for any long periods of time. The last third is very worthy of heralding, and the last few chapters are magnificent, the characters introduced interesting, but, because the wait for it is so long, that wait puts a damper on the novel in its entirety. It may have suited Charlotte to describe at length a profession which she had first-hand experience of, but for the monotonous routine she should have thought twice about how much she said.

I reckon that with a quick look at the back-story, one could easily skip the first half or so of the book. Villette may tie up it’s subplots well and have a brilliant cast of characters, but for the time it takes it’s not a patch on Jane Eyre.

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When things don’t add up they may not be what they seem.

Publisher: Quercus
Pages: 372
Type: Fiction
Age: Young Adult
ISBN: 978-1-84916-394-1
First Published: 6th January 2011
Date Reviewed: 11th January 2011
Rating: 4/5

For some reason, Grace is being held in a white room. In fact even the sparse furnishings are white. Grace doesn’t know how she got there or why she is there, but she knows who her captor is. She knows literally: his name is Ethan and he’s gorgeous, and it looks like he wants her to write, but there’s something else about him that is intriguing. Why Ethan wants her to write and what about, Grace doesn’t know. But the paper is there and right now the only thing Grace can think to chronicle is her lousy existence.

Gritty – that’s the best way I can think of to sum up this novel. To be honest I was expecting it to be more psychological but actually it contains just the right amount of everything. Clarke gives you the basics of the difficult issues but doesn’t go into too much detail, therefore making it a little easier for people who might’ve shied away otherwise. There are a few issues covered in the book, not so many as to make it confusing, and each subplot and character has been given a lot of thought.

Clarke has crafted a very different story, but it’s not different so much for it’s contents as for it’s style and overall presentation. There is a uniqueness that enables the typically mundane to be worthy of reading, for example I’ve been on lots of buses in the rain and Grace’s journeys tend to sound just like them, yet I’m compelled to read about it. Maybe it helps that I’m a Brit like Grace and not that far out of school, but there is something about the day-to-day that drew me. Other times it took me a while to realise that I was reading about a regular event because of the way it was written.

You’d be forgiven for thinking at first that the writing style is clumsy. It becomes apparent very quickly just how tormented Grace is. As she begins to get used to what has become her life, if “used to” is an appropriate phrase, she becomes less anxious over her present situation, saving her upset for the story of her life.

Grace is a strong character but like everyone she has her faults. It’s in these faults that she shines because even if you can’t relate to everything you will undoubtedly be able to relate to something. The other characters aren’t as important and are thus not as detailed, but they are given ample time for you to understand how they have affected Grace.

Part of the plot is easy to figure out but that in itself appears to be a device. We know things before Grace does so that we can appreciate just how long it takes her to start understanding them herself.

I did entertain the thought that maybe he is a vampire. Until I remembered that my life isn’t actually Twilight.

If you are wondering how much like the current crop of young adult novels Entangled is, there is part of your answer. The other part I’m afraid to say would spoil the story to mention here.

I had various ideas in mind as to what the answer would be, as to why Grace was confined, and I admit to being a bit underwhelmed by the answer because of my previous reads. This doesn’t mean that it makes Clarke’s book any less readable however; I attribute the sudden onslaught of books of this nature to coincidence. Each author who has written a book in this vein has put their own spin on it.

In Entangled, Clarke takes a number of well-known situations and problems and discusses them through the use of a story. Quite likely to have a better impact than any reference material, she hits the reader with it hard while being delicate enough so that it’s not overwhelming. And she shows that there is a way out, even when you’re at the very bitter end.

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