The Captive Reader

To say that the last week has been rather stressful would be a most impressive understatement.  Usually, my remedy for any kind of stress is to curl up with a Georgette Heyer or an Alexander McCall Smith.  But, for perhaps the first time ever, they failed me.  After I recovered from the shock, I looked to my bookshelves for further inspiration and saw Eva Ibbotson.  How could I have forgotten about her for so long?  I loved her comforting, light, romantic books when I was a teenager but because I only own one of them (A Countess Below Stairs) seldom reread the others.  For me, comfort reads are usually the ones I can grab off my shelf at three in the morning as the mood takes me.  Obviously, this signals a gap in my personal library that will have to be remedied through visits to used bookstores in the future.

Happily, my library had a copy of A Song for Summer by Eva Ibbotson that arrived at just the right time.  How could I not love a book that sends characters off to all my favourite places: England, Austria, Bohemia, and British Columbia?  And place does play a very important role in this novel: all of the characters are concerned with going home, making a home, or finding a home.  Most of the book is set in Austria in 1937, when young Englishwoman Ellen Carr arrives to take over as housekeeper at an experimental school containing eccentric adults and unchecked youths.  As usual when Ibbotson writes about her homeland, the Austrian countryside is beautifully described and the village of Hallendorf is idyllic.  Romantic in the extreme, I am ready to move there now.  Reading it at lunch on Friday, I actually forgot about my snowy surroundings and felt like I was at Hallendorf:

They had rounded the point and suddenly Schloss Hallendorf lay before her, its windows bathed in afternoon light, and it seemed to her that she had never seen a place so beautiful.  The sun caressed the rose wall, the faded shutters…greening willows trailed their tendrils at the water’s edge; a magnificent cypress sheltered the lower terrace.

But oh so neglected, so shabby!  A tangle of creepers seemed to be all that held up the boathouse; a shutter flapped on its hinges on an upstairs window; the yew hedges were fuzzy and overgrown.  And this of course only made it lovelier, for who could help thinking of Sleeping Beauty and a castle in a fairy tale? (p.14)

Like all of Ibbotson’s heroines, Ellen is good and pretty and brings joy wherever she goes, complete with children and animals frolicking about her.  She’s intelligent but wants to be a housekeeper rather than a scholar or professional, to the disappointment of her suffragette mother and aunts. (Aside: Ibbotson excels at writing aunts.  I remember reading somewhere that if she was ever stuck with a story she just introduced aunts).  Ellen prefers kitchens to labs, children to professional colleagues.  She’s a very unfashionable heroine by modern standards but I couldn’t care less.  I want to believe that people like her exist and, what’s more, I want to be like her.  Considering that my favourite Louisa May Alcott book growing up was An Old Fashioned Girl with the virtuous Polly rather than Little Women with the spunky Jo, my preference for this kind of heroine is hardly a new development.  Ellen’s scarcely a pushover but it seems that any heroine who isn’t overtly ambitious and aggressive is deemed a wet blanket and a poor role model these days.  Pfui.  I find all those spunky heroines obnoxious and tiring.  The restful, maternal Ellen is a charming alternative.    

Marek, on the other hand, is a tiresome hero.  I am predisposed to forgive him many of his sins as he is a) Czech and b) possessed of one of my favourite names.  Unfortunately, he is meant to be too many things to too many people and as a result comes out as a strange amalgamation of talents with little individuality.  Sensitive musical genius, selfless resistance fighter, landed gentry, gardener, pilot, fencing instructor…he pretty much does everything except emote.  I wanted desperately feel some real attachment to him but was never able to, not with him coming across as temperamental and immature just when he needs to be practical and constant.  It wasn’t all bad though: the musical storyline, centered on Marek, did give me a desperate urge to listen to Der Rosenkavalier again.  I do love Strauss and such a romantic musician is well suited to this romantic book.    

Ibbotson never makes things too easy for her characters.  There are frustrating twists and turns that probably add some much needed angst to the plot.  Ibbotson’s wit and energy, as always, save this from becoming sappy or trite.  I am romantic enough that I like things to be simple but in wartime, and particularly with a hero as pointlessly noble as Marek, things are never simple.  It does make for an interesting book though and a very enjoyable read; absolutely the right thing for this moment in my life.