I have continued my reading in Terri Windling’s Fairy Tale Series with this adaptation of the tale of Snow White. I have dreaded writing about Tanith Lee’s White As Snow. I found the book almost repellent.

The story opens with Arpazia, a young princess, facing the conquest of her father’s city and her own certain death. She attempts to escape and is captured by the enemy king. After he attacks her, he decides to make her his queen. She bears his daughter Candacis, who is quickly rejected by her numbed mother and ignored by her brutal father. Arpazia finds some pleasure in life again when she becomes involved in the pagan fertility plays held at night in the woods. When her daughter becomes old enough to usurp Arpazia’s role in these rites, Arpazia pays someone to kill her.

Lee combines the Snow White story with the Greek myth of Persphone, Hades and Ceres. Snow White (Candacis) is conflated with Persephone, and the queen who seeks her death is also her mother, Ceres, searching for her throughout the world. Names accrue around the characters as the story goes on, until each character has several. This serves to depersonalize the character, so that the mythic role they play becomes more important than their individual identities. The inescapability of fate and the inevitable repetition of pagan cycles features largely. The magic in this story only highlights its despair. There is neither hope nor solace in this version of Snow White.

The contempt for men expressed in this book borders on revulsion. The female characters, though tormented and possibly evil, are nevertheless full human characters. Their motives can be understood and may even garner sympathy. The men are merely bestial. Most are flat, cartoonish figures without reasons for their behavior. The only vaguely positive male character is a dwarf who, like the female characters, has been tortured and enslaved most of his life, so he is allowed an almost human quality.

This is the first book I have read by Tanith Lee. Perhaps she has other novels where something other than despair, meaningless and inescapable, happens. But this sample of her work leaves me disinclined to try anything else.

***Updated Below to include Shannon’s additions.

I thought I’d follow the lead of Teacher Lady and Chilihead on this meme. Join me if you feel like it.

1. One book that changed your life: Wuthering Heights. It preemptively taught me the misery of falling for an angry, temperamental man. Bad boys have had zero appeal ever since. And I do not understand women who find Heathcliff romantic. Did they read the same book I did?

2. One book that you’ve read more than once: Robin McKinley’s Sunshine. This is my favorite insomnia book, best read in the bathtub. Or with a beer. Or with a beer in the bathtub.

3. One book you would want on a desert island: Any collection of John Donne’s work, the more complete the better.

4. One book that made you laugh: Farley Mowat’s The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be. A wonderful, quick little book. I gave copies to every member of my family and - which is shocking - they read it.

5. One book that made you cry: A Virtuous Woman by Kaye Gibbons. I sobbed because Ruby was childless. I sobbed because Jack was alone. I sobbed a lot.

6. One book that you wish had been written: Elizabeth Tudor’s Private Diary Full of Juicy Secrets.

7. One book that you wish had never been written: I could list some of the books that inspired evil in the world, but, human nature being what it is, the evil probably would have happened anyway with a different book for inspiration. So I’ll go with annoyingly bad writing. How about the entire Left Behind series?

8. The book that you are currently reading: Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan of the Apes. Shut up.

9. One book that you have been meaning to read: We Made A Garden by Margery Fish. It’s a classic of garden writing, published in 1956. It sat on my shelf for a month before I realized that, since we might be moving to the arid southwest, it was too heartbreaking to read about gardening anywhere it rains.

I would love to see how Bub and Pie and edj answer this.

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10. Books you don’t enjoy: Anything with the following descriptions in the blurb: “coming of age in the sixties,” “exploring the power of desire,” “darkly sensual” or “kafkaesque.”

11. Book you remember as a real page-turner: The Hero and the Crown by Robin McKinley, Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer, In the Heart of the Sea by Nathaniel Philbrick.

12: Non-fiction books you have enjoyed: Ava’s Man by Rick Bragg, a beautiful tribute by the author to his grandfather, and Divorced, Beheaded, Survived by Karen Lindsey, a scintillating account of the lives of the wives of Henry VIII.

13: Children’s books your family has loved: My girls are toddlers, so the big ones around here are picture books. Books that they love and I love to read to them would be Cotton Mill Town by Kathleen Hershey (my favorite), The Dragons Are Singing Tonight by Jack Prelutsky, any of the tales of Beatrix Potter, and the Gossie series by Oliver Dunrea.

I have continued to read in Terri Windling’s Fairy Tale Series. After a regrettable experience with Pamela Dean’s Tam Lin (I read 176 pages before putting it down because I simply could not make myself care about the indistinguishable characters), I tried this 1987 publication from Charles de Lint. I was curious how I would experience this book as an adult. When I was a young teen, de Lint’s Moonheart was one of my favorite books, but I had not read anything of his in a decade or two.

Jack the Giant Killer sets several classic fairy tales in modern day Ottawa. I confess that charmed me at the start. I do not know the city very well, but my husband and I honeymooned there after a dreadfully hot American summer, and the city holds a cooling magic for me (though I understand they are suffering a heat wave now. My sympathies.). De Lint’s book combines the stories of Jack the Giant Killer and Katie Crackernuts, and adds allusions to the Seven Swans and other tales. His Jack is a young woman named Jacky, who fills the trickster role assigned to the Jacks of fairy tales. Jacky, drunk and heartbroken, accidentally witnesses the murder of a Hob, an elf-like fairy creature. She takes the hat dropped by the deceased, and when she puts it on, she can see into the fairy realm, which exists invisibly in the same time and space as our own. She meets the Gruagagh of her city, and through him takes on the task of rescuing a fairy princess from the dark Host that seeks the destruction of the good fairies. She acquires friends and helpers along the way, like her mortal best friend Kate Hazel (i.e., Katie Crackernuts).

De Lint’s novel is swiftly paced, and combines heroic action with ordinary behavior. His heroines do impossible things while remaining recognizable twentieth-century Canadians. There are few profound themes here, though the book has a significantly Tolkienesque morality. It was fun, light reading.

There were two burrs in my enjoyment of this book. The first was a premise, fairly common in fantasy literature, that fairies and other magical creatures depend upon human belief for their existence. As humans cease to believe, the fairies are weakened. I have always found this premise a little disappointing. The power of magical realms and mythic stories, it seems to me, lies in their ability to convey the Other, the alien realities that intrude onto our own. To make magic dependent on human belief removes some of the Otherness, and changes the frisson of fearful strangeness into pity for the sadly helpless. Instead of taking us to Balder’s country, it says Balder’s country is in our imagination, and could we help it out a little. How utterly drab. Myth hardly seems worth bothering about, then.

The second flaw was de Lint’s willingness to mix a little religious speculation with his Fairy Tale. I much prefer Tolkien’s way in Lord of the Rings of leaving religion as an unmentioned undercurrent. De Lint’s novel has a rather explicit henotheism, the belief that each land has its own particular god who rules it. One character tells Jacky that the “dying desert god” (Jesus) has no power in North America, which is ruled by a Native American deity. This brief conversation has little relevance to the rest fo the story, and I am not sure why de Lint chose to include it, unless it was to voice his opinions on Christianity. The mixing of religion and Faerie merely serves to weaken the spiritual power of both. Disappointing.

Other than that, my only complaint, which says more about my own lack of education than de Lint’s writing, was my bewilderment at the pronunciation of some of the Gaelic terms. Gruagagh, for instance, is apparently a Manx term for brownie or ogre, but I still have no idea how to say it. A pronunciation guide would have been nice.

Briar Rose is Jane Yolen’s contribution to Terry Windling’s Fairy Tale Series, a set of novels that retell fairy tales set in real historic periods. I discovered the series when I read (and enjoyed) Patricia Wrede’s Snow White and Rose Red, and I have another volume, Pamela Dean’s Tam Lin, on my shelf awaiting me.

The first few novels I tried by Yolen were forgettable, and I probably never would have bothered reading her again if I had not found one of her short stories in a collection in honor of JRR Tolkien. I do not now recall the title, but it was a story of children kidnapped by goblins, and it was simply wonderful. So I decided to give her novels another try.

Briar Rose is the story of Sleeping Beauty set in the Holocaust. Unlike the other books in the Fairy Tale Series, there is no magic in this story, unless it is the magic of improbable survival. Yolen opens her book with a quote from Jack Zipes in Spells of Enchantment:

“(B)oth the oral and literary forms of the fairy tale are grounded in history: they emanate from specific struggles to humanize bestial and barbaric forces, which have terrorized our minds and communities in concrete ways, threatening to destroy free will and human compassion. The fairy tale sets out to conquer terror through metaphors.”

Presumably this is her purpose in writing about the Holocaust. A difficult goal, but one which she manages reasonably well.

Gemma is an old woman, living in the US. She is dying. She has three grand-daughters, who have heard her tell the story of Sleeping Beauty throughout their lives. Gemma has always insisted that she is Sleeping Beauty. On her death bed, she asks her youngest grand-daughter, Becca, a twenty-three-year-old journalist, to find her castle. Becca promises. The rest of the book details Becca’s search for her grandmother’s identity, leading her to a death camp in Poland. Yolen alternates chapters of Becca’s search with segments of the version of Sleeping Beauty which Gemma told. This structure works surprisingly well, creating an aura of magic around a painful reality.

The characterization is mediocre, but the novel still works. The fairy tale rubric renders the horrors of Gemma’s experience somehow real enough to touch the heart, but magical enough to leave hope alive. The beautiful princess survives, and there is a happy ending of sorts. Yolen’s choice to make the princely hero a gay man gave me pause. Within the story it serves to remove romance from the happy ending, which I found satisfying, but the choice was so obviously a political one that I almost put the novel down.

I am still trying to figure out my own reaction to Briar Rose. The disturbing details of genocide in the book mean it is inappropriate for children. The details of history are gruesome and horrifying, and Yolen gives only the barest description necessary, which is horrifying enough. It is definitely an adult book, and she classifies it as such on her website. Briar Rose would be a useful book for inspiring discussion in a book group. In fact, I think I might suggest it to mine.

I love men. Really. (Okay, my love may be 1/2 pity, but I’m not emphasizing it). Men have their own companionable ethos for relating to each other, they have those rumbly voices, and they look nice in sweaters. Reason enough. And I am always intrigued when I get a glimpse into the male world. Despite what you see on tv, groups exclusively male do exist that have nothing to do with football or firefighting. But there’s not much of it visible in popular culture. TV portrays groups of men mostly by their extremes, usually evil ones. The best popular media can find in a bunch of men is a little gentle buffoonery.

But there was a time when the world of men was not so circumscribed. Men used to consort with each other for purposes other than farting and watching porn. Michael Innes’s The Case of the Journeying Boy is a mystery published in 1949, telling the story of a boy and his tutor. The tutor, a fiftyish intellectual whose career has been spent preparing boys for school, is a remnant of the now extinct world of bachelor scholarship, a quiet and cerebral haven for the contentedly womanless. Mr. Thewless, the tutor, is not only the authority for the boy’s studies, but also the father figure whose expertise in raising children is assumed. He quietly opines to himself throughout the novel about the best way to deal with his charge’s problems, without the five pages of musings on the absent father and changing roles of men a current novel would insist on.

Innes’s style is formal and carefully circuitous. He both respects and gently mocks the academic brain of his protagonist. His characters talk around a subject rather than state things directly. He uses the Victorian habit of slowing down his prose during dramatic action. When the tension is high, his sentences become downright turgid. For example, at one point, Mr. Thewless is being followed through a darkened house by two dangerous criminals. Innes describes Thewless walking up the steps toward a light:

And again - and this assuredly was more ominous - he derived no satisfaction from the reflection that he was climbing steadily into a lesser darkness; into what was, comparatively speaking, a medium of light. It was clearly within our friend’s recollection that the upper corridor upon which his own room lay admitted through some system of skylights considerably more of whatever mild moonlight lay without; and moreover that the periodic illumination from the lighthouse lent fleetingly to the scene a quality of which the only description at once compendious and fair would be one free of any hint of inconvenient tenebrosity.

Not the language of a best-seller, but, I must confess, I love it. It is a linguaphile’s thriller, paced for someone who will enjoy the plodding, carefully chosen words as much as the action. Perfect.

The details of the mystery itself, though improbable, are expressed with just the right amount of suspense. We uncover the clues only slightly ahead of the detective, Inspector Cadover, and watching him decipher the clues and make his own guesses is half the fun. There are secret caves and chases, coshes and countless impersonations. Thewless’s character is tested, and a father learns to respect his son. How could it be better?

** I also loved Innes’s From London Far, which I would have read just for the set up: a classics scholar wanders into a tobaccanist’s shop while quoting a favorite bit of poetry. Unknowingly, he has uttered a secret password that sweeps him into a covert world of post-war art theft. Delicious.