Book Review | ‘Florence and Giles’ by John Harding

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book review, edgar allan poe, florence and giles, gothic fiction, henry james, john harding, literature, peter ackroyd, poe a life cut short, the turn of the screw

Florence and Giles by John Harding

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This was my Hallowe’en read for the year, and I did get rather excited at the prospect of a ‘Poe’ meets ‘The Turn of the Screw‘, but it really wasn’t to be. While the concept is firmly rooted in the Gothic tradition (thanks to it being almost a re-write of the illustrious, aforementioned title by Henry James) it really does lack in the ‘scare factor’ that it so promises on the back cover.

This is the story of Florence and Giles, two orphaned children living with their estranged uncle in a vast, sprawling estate known as Blithe House. However, the name of the house is grossly misleading as nothing about the place is ‘blithe’. It is a cold, forbidding mansion with ancient turrets and a dark history. Florence is our precocious little narrator, and guides us through the ghostly happenings of the place and the strange people who live there.

Besides her quiet, rather innocent brother (who needs protecting most of the time) there is her uncle, a pedantic odd sort of man who much to Florence’s annoyance, forbids her to read. Despite her uncle’s stern request Florence does read and her midnight sojourns to the crumbling library were the most enjoyable parts of the book. A bit of a childhood fantasy come true for me! Another endearing aspect to Florence’s personality is her affection for Shakespeare, which she admires so much that she adopts his ‘word-forgery’. As a result she develops her own take on English, splicing words together to make them seem more dramatic. In some aspects she is uncannily like her uncle, and as the novel progresses is further strengthened to suggest a far closer blood-bond.

However when it comes to the accidental death of the old governess, and the appointment of the new one, I find things get a bit tedious. I could clearly see that the new governess was supposed to be a very scary witch-like character, possibly even a revenant, and Harding almost DID pull it off in a particularly hair-raising sequence, but it was never followed up after that.

Instead there is a ‘twist’, in that we realise that our narrator may not be as reliable as we first thought. For me, the turn of events served to kill the story rather than improve it.

It is a good novel for gothic fiction fans, but those looking fora bit more ‘oomph’ needn’t bother. If you want something like Poe, read Poe. There are really no substitutes for them in my opinion, but having said that I do commend Harding for having a go at it.

If you are interested in Edgar Allen Poe, please read my review on Poe: A Life Cut Short by Peter Ackroyd.

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Book Review | ‘The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Other Stories’ – F. Scott Fitzgerald

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Aspern Papers, benjamin button, book review, Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Cut-Glass Bowl, f. scott fitzgerald, Great Gatsby, henry james, United States

This is a book of short stories aimed at encapsulating the fleeting American ‘jazz age’. Fitzgerald manages to convey the golden decadence of an era that is most famous for its ‘Lost Generation’. As Fitzgerald himself put it, the 1920’s held ‘a generation grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken.’ Throughout this collection of stories, Fitzgerald maintains a thinly palpable vein of impatient inertia, where all his characters, big or small, find that life has somehow overreached them no matter what they do. I found the damning realisation of ‘time’ (or there not being enough of it) to be the greatest source of this anxiety.    

 

What would life be like if you lived it in reverse..?

Out of the seven short stories collated in this edition, ‘The Curious Case of Benjamin Button‘, ‘The Cut Glass Bowl‘ and ‘The Four Fists’ are probably the most dynamic and startling. This is the first time I have ever actually read Fitzgerald. There was one botched attempt at ‘The Great Gatsby‘ but that ended in failure as I grew too weary to carry on. However, I am glad to say that Fitzgerald is far more successful as a writer of short stories. For one, all the stories save two (‘May Day’ and ‘Crazy Sunday’) span the lifetime of a character, drawing attention to a certain thread of events and the often irreversible effects of the decisions made by those characters. With ‘Benjamin Button’, we have the unique and surreal premise of a young child who decides to live life backwards. Fitzgerald’s play on chronology itself is a clever plot device and added a doubled effect of absurdity and poignancy to the flow of the narrative. The unnatural chain of events lead us to look at each era of human life at a different angle, rendering every stage from childhood to old age a precious gift not to be wasted.

‘The Cut-Glass Bowl’ is again a moralistic tale of karma, using the Gothic-inspired device of attributing a physical object, this time a glass bowl, as the harbinger of death. With this story Fitzgerald studies the nature of marriage in the 1920’s. He traces with deft descriptions the early bloom and subsequent break-down of husband/wife relationships through a decidedly macabre lens. ‘The Four Fists’ is in the same vein, this time telling the story of how manhood and meaning of ‘becoming’ an adult.

For me, this book was a great re-introduction to Fitzgerald, as it helped me understand his ‘style’ a little better. I often have trouble with certain American authors, especially when their work is concentrated within a specific genre or time-period that is slightly alien to me. I almost had the same problem with Henry James until I read ‘The Aspern Papers’. So if you are like me, and worried that you can’t quite ‘get’ into the flow of certain writers, my recommendation is to get your hands on something shorter and perhaps a little less denser.

I give this book 3/5 stars, but it has helped me tremendously in learning to like Fitzgerald a bit more.

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• F. Scott Fitzgerald (akserendipity.wordpress.com)
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