The Captive Reader

Ah, New Year’s Eve.  While others will be heading out on the town tonight, laden with high spirits as well as alcoholic ones, I will most likely be curled up on the couch with a book until I go to bed at some absurdly early hour (generally, one so early that even senior citizens look at me askance).  Life is good.

But it also means that today is the last day of 2010 and therefore my last chance to get a review up in even a remotely timely manner (because if you’re reviewing books from last year, even if that was only yesterday, it just doesn’t seem right).  So I bring you not one, not two, but three reviews, which conveniently gets my total number of books reviewed this year up to 120.  And how better to end the year than with the delightful novels of Eva Ibbotson?

Magic Flutes may be my least favourite Ibbotson novel, though as I love all of her novels that isn’t a particularly impressive distinction.  It was only her second adult novel, after the more successfully executed A Countess Below Stairs, but somehow reads like a first attempt.  Her petite heroine Tessa is an orphaned Austrian princess with a costly castle and a love for music.  The novel opens in 1922 with Tessa in Vienna working backstage for an opera company while her aged aunts occupy the family castle, hopeful that a buyer will appear.  And appear he does in the form of the mysterious English millionaire Guy Farne, who buys the castle and hires Tessa’s opera company to perform The Magic Flute in the castle’s private theatre in a grand gesture aimed at Nerine, his first love.  But, of course, Guy and Tessa fall in love, complicating matters somewhat.

The plot itself is eerily familiar to A Countess Below Stairs, from the nobly-born young woman working a menial job to the heroine’s childhood friend slash intended husband to the hero’s narcissistic fiancée.  And A Countess Below Stairs does a better job with all of these characters, making both them and the situations they find themselves in almost believable, unlike in Magic Flutes.  Tessa and Guy are shockingly forgettable, to the extent that when I wrote my notes up on the book only hours after reading it I actually had to look Guy’s name up since I’d already forgotten it.  The supporting cast of impoverished nobles and eccentric musicians supply most of the comedy and all of the memorable characters.  Prince Maxi, Tessa’s dim-witted intended, is particularly wonderful with his dual passions of hunting water fowl and watching (and re-watching ad nauseum) silent films.  The adoring ballet dancer Heidi is a perfect match for him.  Indeed, I cared more about their strange relationship than I did for Guy and Tessa’s.  Guy is not present enough to make a real impact and Tessa has no bite, leaving her with a rather insipid personality.  Still, that didn’t keep me from enjoying this fairy tale and warming to their happy ending.

Madensky Square, on the other hand, is probably Ibbotson’s most skillfully written novel and certainly her most mature, both in terms of characters and themes.  Set in Vienna, of course, in 1911, it follows a year in the life of Susanna Weber, a dress-maker, a devoted mistress, a loyal friend, and an altogether charming heroine.  We learn about Susanna’s life prior to moving to Vienna, her youth in the country, an early love affair and the daughter it produced who was then given away, and her introduction to the General, her great love.  But mostly we learn about Susanna’s life in Madensky Square where her salon is located.  We know her neighbours, her employers, her friends and her customers.  We love and loathe them as she does.  We long to taste the one pear her forlorn pear tree has born, to listen to the child piano prodigy Sigi as he practices for hours each day, to watch life go by in the square. 

Susanna is unique among Ibbotson’s heroines in that she is mature and independent, most assuredly a woman and a force to be reckoned with.  Her love for her General and for her lost daughter shapes but does not control her.  She has other interests and concerns, is a friend and a neighbour and, delightfully, a match-maker between the bluestocking Edith and the butcher Huber.  The people of Madensky Square love and lust, physically as well as intellectually.  My sensible, Methodist exterior with its disdain for alcohol and parties hides my romantic, Catholic interior that longs for beautiful clothes, frivolous nightgowns and large feather beds.  These two identities are always at war: my sensible Bachelor of Commerce reality versus the future as a Viennese opera singer I denied as impractical years ago when I was being urged to go there to train.  Ibbotson makes it seem that not only is it natural to image and long for such things, it is imperative to the Viennese way of life.  I want to live in Ibbotson’s Vienna with its opera-goers and soldiers, mistresses and anarchists.  It is a city intent on sensual pleasures and this attitude gives all its residents a certain glamour.

And, finally, The Morning Gift.  Intellectually, I know the more nuanced Madensky Square should be my favourite Ibbotson novel.  But it’s not.  I love The Morning Gift.  I love it to the extent that when I finished reading it I seriously contemplated starting it right over again just so that I wouldn’t have to part from it so soon.  It has all my favourite things: Austrian refugees, a wealthy, scholarly hero, a marriage of convenience, and largely academic setting.  Knowing that Persephone wanted to publish this title but was unable to gain the rights might make me love it even more (but, oh, if that had been able to publish it how wonderful that would have been!).

Ruth Berger is left behind in Vienna in 1938 when her family flees to England after the Anschluss.  Unable to leave on her own, family friend Quin Somerville proposes a marriage of convenience that would allow Ruth to leave as the wife of a British national.  The two arrive in England, Ruth is reunited with her family and Quin resumes his normal life of teaching at the University, squiring elegant women about town, and planning his next scientific research trips while the lawyers begin the complicated process of annulling the marriage.  But, of course, it’s not as simple as that.

Ruth is wonderful in that she’s less fantastically perfect than many of Ibbotson’s other heroines.  She’s also a very serious student, which is rare and always appreciated.  On the other hand, like all of Ibbotson’s heroines, she’s devoted to music and nature and has a remarkable gift for making friends everywhere and at all social levels.  But I love Ibbotson’s heroines because they are that way.  Fantastical as they may be, that doesn’t keep me from wishing there were more (any?) people like them in the real world.  Her heroes, on the other hand, usually leave a lot to be desired.  By that standard, Quin is rather good.  Frankly, after the over-loaded Marek in A Song for Summer, anyone is going to look fantastic.  Yes, Quin’s a bit broody and emotionally distant (strangely at war with his compassionate treatment of so many European refugees) but he’s not too over the top and generally seems quite human and intelligent, which is what makes the critical miscommunication between him and Ruth so particularly frustrating, as neither had come across as proud or stubborn until that key moment.

Ibbotson preys on a particular weakness of mine: scientific men, particularly naturalists out in the field.  The combination of adventures, athleticism, and academia is a potent mixture, one that fueled many a childhood day-dream.  Quin is the personification of these fantasies with the added bonus of a personal fortune and seaside estate.  If such men exist (if, indeed, they ever existed outside of books) is it too much to ask that one may find and fall in love with me?

Though I make rank some more highly than others, I love all of Ibbotson’s novels.  I love the comfort I derive from them and the way that each of them transports me into a fantasy world of pastel-coloured Austrian castles, the green English countryside, and straightforward but sophisticatedly-executed romantic plots.  Ibbotson died this fall at the age of 85, leaving readers the many joys and delights found in both her adult and children’s books but still you can’t help but wish there had been more!