Kiraly

In the days of my youth, when I finished The Golden Compass, I immediately snatched up its sequel the The Subtle Knife and dived in. I zoomed through, finished it up, and set it aside with an impatient yearning for the next book to come out already, as surely the third book in the series would redeem this middle book, which was ever so slightly disappointing.

Upon rereading The Subtle Knife with littlerhymes, I still find it ever so slightly disappointing. I feel this review would have a stronger narrative arc if my opinions had changed, but actually they’re pretty much the same.

(Well, okay, there is one difference. As a child, I don’t think I noticed the creepy instrumentality of Asriel’s forces in his fight against the Authority, most prominently the two angels who let Stanislaus Grumman/John Parry get shot because “his task was over once he’d led you to us.” Just catastrophically failing at the Kantian maxim to treat people as ends not means. This may be something that Pullman will unpack in The Amber Spyglass; I genuinely don’t remember.)

First of all, I’ve just never loved Will like I love Lyra. The best parts in The Subtle Knife in my opinion are the bits where Lyra goes off on her own and does her Lyra thing, like the bit where she goes to meet Mary Malone and makes the dark matter machine talk to her like the alethiometer. (I also loved the bit where Mary Malone has a chat with the dark matter machine and follows its directions through a door to another world, and one of the reasons I MOST wanted the sequel to come out, like, yesterday, was that I really wanted to know what would happen to her next.)

The bits where Lyra and Will work together to solve problems are also fun. The bit where they confront Lord Boreal about stealing the alethiometer and his snake daemon pokes its little head out of his sleeve? Iconic. The part where they use the subtle knife to get back into his house by cutting windows back and forth between worlds, culminating in Will hiding behind Lord Boreal’s couch and Lyra crouched beside him, but in another world? Amazing job leaning into the premise.

When it’s just Will doing his Will stuff? Eh. He’s fine I guess. I don’t dislike him, but he’s just kind of there taking up time we could be devoting to Lyra.

I had also pretty much forgotten everything that focused on the adult characters, possibly because as a child I simply didn’t care about adult characters (with the exception of Mary Malone) and therefore didn’t bother to read those parts. They are not bad parts! They just weren’t what I was into at eleven. I probably appreciated them more now.

But I think the bigger problem with The Subtle Knife is that it just can’t live up to The Golden Compass. In The Golden Compass, Lyra moves through many different worlds-within-worlds in her own world, and they’re all fascinating, almost all places that the reader would love to visit. Who wouldn’t want to have a glass of Tokay in the Jordan College Retiring Room, attend one of Mrs. Coulter’s cocktail parties, ride in a gyptian boat, see the bear’s fortress at Svalbard?

At the end of The Golden Compass, Lyra walks into the sky to explore strange new worlds, seek out new life and new civilizations, etc. etc., and what does she find? The world of Ci’gazze, which starts out vaguely promising - an abandoned city, that’s cool, right? But it turns out to be completely full of Spectres that will suck out your life the second you hit puberty, and it appears to have no other characteristics, none of the richness of any of the places Lyra visited in her own world.

But the next book, my child self was sure, would get us back on track. We would visit more worlds, and these worlds would be INTERESTING worlds, and maybe Will would just kind of disappear.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Over the years, littlerhymes has been educating me about Australian children’s literature. Most recently she sent me Colin Thiele’s Storm Boy, a slim and lovely book full of gorgeous descriptions of the barren yet beautiful storm-wracked shore where seabirds nest. Our hero, Storm Boy, lives here with his father, and befriends a baby pelican whom he names Mr. Percival. ( Spoilers )

After a gap of years since my last Ngaio Marsh, I returned to my favorite Golden Age mystery author! (Sorry, Sayers and Christie. Sayers in particular I think is probably actually a better writer than Marsh, but the heart wants what it wants.) This time, I read A Wreath for Rivera, in which a convoluted-seeming mystery winds round to a satisfyingly simple solution. The family dynamics are excellently portrayed as usual in Marsh, and although I love her mysteries I do just a little bit wish she’d written a non-mystery or two, just to see how it would have turned out.

I also finished Daphne du Maurier’s Golden Lads: Sir Francis Bacon, Anthony Bacon and Their Friends, which is one of those books that is interesting while you’re reading it but also eminently put-downable, hence the fact that it’s taken me a few months. Despite the title, it’s really a biography of Anthony Bacon, Tudor Spy, with just a bit of Sir Francis Bacon (presumably Sir Francis’s name is more marketable). Major downside of being a Tudor spymaster: you pay for the whole operation out of pocket and are rewarded, at best, with gratitude.

Continuing the spy theme, I read Ben Macintyre’s Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory, a rollicking adventure featuring spies who are having the time of their lives. They pull off a major intelligence coup which is made into a major motion picture about fifteen years later, in which spymaster Ewen Montagu himself got to play a cameo role! Spying: extremely effective, glamorous, and also glorious. The antithesis of Le Carre.

What I’m Reading Now

In Elizabeth Gaskell’s Gothic Tales, I just finished the tragic story “Lois the Witch,” about a girl accused of witchcraft during the Salem witch trials. Really effectively miserable and claustrophobic. If anyone ever tries to pack you off to your sole remaining surviving family in Puritan New England, I strongly suggest that you find a job as an under-housemaid instead.

What I Plan to Read Next

Dick Francis’s Whip Hand awaits!

My mother volunteers at the local library, and sometimes I help her process the new books, which is how I discovered Sandra Nickel’s Making Light Bloom: Clara Driscoll and the Tiffany Lamps.

Picture book biographies seem to be having a real moment, which is convenient for me as I’ve apparently got a weakness for them. Most of the current run focus on a lesser-known woman or person of color who did a cool thing, for values of “lesser-known” that vary from “actually I think this person is really pretty famous” to “no one has ever heard of this person.”

Clara Driscoll definitely falls in the latter category. Not only is she not famous now, but she was unknown in her own lifetime, as she did her work under contract in the Tiffany factory. She started out cutting out glass for the famous Tiffany windows, a job that required quite a bit of artistic taste as these windows are famous, among other things, for their gorgeous variegated glass - the cutters had to select the particular part of the big sheet of glass that would look best in the whole window.

Eventually, it occurred to Driscoll that one might also make stained glass lamps. Her design for a dragonfly lamp caught Louis Tiffany’s eye, and the lamp went to the World’s Fair, where it was a big hit. Tiffany gave Driscoll permission to design more lamps, and she went on to design at least sixty, all with beautiful nature themes.

The illustrations by Julie Paschkis are in a striking stained glass style: it was this reason that the cover caught my eye. Like Tiffany windows, the colors vary within one panel, orange drifting into red and green to yellow. A rich and lovely array of colors.

As basic groundwork for further Newbery posts, I’ve laid out some Newbery trends decade by decade.

1920s

The Newbery award was first awarded in 1922, and perhaps because the award was still finding its feet, the decade is a bit of an outlier in many respects. It’s the only decade where there were years when no runners-up were selected, and it has the highest percentage of male awardees. In 1928, Dhan Gopal Mukerji is the first author of color to win a Newbery with a story about a pigeon that I read as a child and remember as extremely dull. Lots of nonsense books of the Alice in Wonderland type, as well as many folktales.

1930s

A big swing in the opposite direction with runners-up: sometimes in the 1930s there were as many as eight. A precipitous drop to a single nonsense book by Anne Parrish, and a slightly less precipitous drop in folktales. The first appearance of non-nonsense fantasy. (Technically you could argue that Grace Hallock’s 1929 The Boy Who Was also counts, but I would argue that the magic is merely a device to explore history.) Big themes of the decade include tomboys and coming of age, sometimes at the same time. A lot of books that would probably be classified as YA today on the basis of the narrator’s age and responsibility level, but also wouldn’t be published as YA today because the romance is in the background rather than front and center.

1940s

The tomboys peter out. (In fact, in the 1940s they’re solely represented in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books.) Again a single nonsense book. You might expect World War II to have a big effect but in fact it’s most evident in post-war stories about rebuilding.

1950s

The Cold War definitely had a big effect, though. The Newbery goes hard for American history (especially biographies), liberty, and God. American history and liberty were already popular in previous decades, but before and after the 1950s religion tends to appear as a cultural detail rather than a theological argument. Anne Parrish keeps the nonsense flame alight with a single winner.

1960s

American gender politics are finally starting to catch up to where the Newberys ended up after the Decade of Tomboys. A sprinkling of folktales, last seen in the 1920s and 30s. The definitive triumph of fantasy over nonsense books. At the end of the decade we begin to see the impact of the Civil Rights Movement.

1970s

A fantastic decade for fantasy. Nonsense makes a last dying gasp in Ellen Raskin’s Figgs & Phantoms. A big shift in attitudes toward predatory animals: in earlier decades they’re usually just Bad, but now there’s more nuance in their portrayal. Dogs, friendly badgers, friends in general, and relatives start dropping like flies. By the end of the decade, the Newbery embraces ownvoices (although not under that name just yet). Awkwardly, one of these ownvoices authors is later discovered to be a fraud, which doesn’t stop him from getting hired as the Native American consultant for Star Trek: Voyager two decades later.

1980s

The Newbery enters its grimdark phase. Friends and animal companions kick it. Two separate genocide memoirs. There have always been some dysfunctional families in the Newberys, but now it becomes a definite theme. A drift away from ownvoices. As in all decades, there were some individual books I really liked (including some of the dark and deathy ones!) but overall there’s a lot of doom and gloom.

1990s

A hint of dawn. Some fantastic fantasy and historical fiction books. (I am of course probably biased because this was the decade when I reached prime Newbery age.) An oscillation back towards ownvoices. Fewer dead animals, more dead relatives. The Newbery has always had individual books with disabled protagonists, but now it Discovers Disability, which sounds like it should be a good thing but actually, at this point, seems to indicate a shift away from disabled protagonists and towards the protag watching someone else fight their disability and lose.

This is where my neat decade categorization really breaks down, because there’s sort of a Long Nineties that lasts until about 2014. All these trends continue. There are a couple of unexpected returns to the outer borders of nonsense territory.

2015-today

From 2015 onward, the Newbery went all in on ownvoices (and this is where the term really began to be used) in all categories: race, disability, and gender/sexuality, this last one gingerly at first but with increasing forthrightness in the 2020s. Dead relatives remain a reliable theme. There have always been a smattering of Newbery picture books, but now graphic novels appear in increasing numbers.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Ruth Goodman is always a good time, and her book How to Behave Badly in Elizabeth England: A Guide for Knaves, Fools, Harlots, Cuckolds, Drunkards, Liars, Thieves, and Braggarts is no exception to the rule. It does what it says on the tin, except for “Elizabethan England” read “England from the time of Elizabeth up to the Civil War (with brief excursions before and after),” but I suspect that the publishers believed, correctly, that their title would sell more books.

A fun fact: quoting Shakespeare would have been seen as proof of boorishness, as it showed that you spend time at the theaters down by the bear-baiting pits and the whorehouses, like a COMMONER. I also very much enjoyed the advice manual for young noblemen in service, which begged them to “try not to murder people.” You might think that goes without saying, but nope!

Jacqueline Woodson is also always a good time, although often in a mild to moderately heart-wrenching kind of way. Peace, Locomotion is an epistolary novel, told as a series of letters from a 12-year-old boy (nickname Locomotion) to his younger sister. They’re both in foster care following the death of their parents in a fire a few years ago. A book with sad moments but not overall a sad book; I particularly enjoyed Locomotion’s journey as a poet and his poetry. (There’s a companion novel-in-verse. Woodson is one of the few authors I trust with a novel-in-verse.)

Warning: you will walk out of this book with the song “Locomotion” stuck in your head.

Jane Langton is much more up and down than either Goodman or Woodson, but I’m happy to say Paper Chains is one of the ups. Evelyn has just started college, and the novel alternates between traditional narration and Evelyn’s never-to-be-sent letters to her PHIL 101 professor, on whom she has a swooning freshman crush. A good mix of college hijinks and intellectual discovery. Just kind of stops rather than having a real ending, but it works well for the story, which is very much about beginnings.

What I’m Reading Now

Onward in Gaskell’s Gothic Tales! We just had one of Gaskell’s trademarked “three people of three different faiths get together to deal with a problem, and it’s good for them all!” scenes. (Okay, I’ve only run across this twice in her work, once here and once in North and South, but it’s an unusual recurring theme.)

What I Plan to Read Next

I’ve decided it’s time for another Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. I’ve already read A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch and all three volumes of The Gulag Archipelago. What should I read next?