cattytrona's reviews
298 reviews

stayed up until after midnight reading this, like a child with a torch under the covers! flew by, hooked me in! love the atmosphere of the setting, love the dominoing twists, love the commitment to being a romp & how that never comes at the expense of research, intelligence or style

you’ve heard of, ‘this meeting could have been an email’? now get ready for… this novel could have been a short story!

so dull. you could reduce this to a plot summary, and not lose a single word of interesting, artful prose.

daniel deronda? i hardly know her!

insane story. starts out so incredibly strong. the first part is a beautiful piece of character work. eliot conjures gwendolen in such a compelling way, she really skilfully handles shifts in time and perspective, and renders emotion in ways i’m genuinely unsure i’ve read before - but sure have felt! - particularly those unnamed emotions which are neither positive nor negative but something electrically in between.

reading this with adam bede in mind was sort of weird, because the parallels between them are so striking. gwendolen and hetty are separated by class and a century, but they’re both beautiful young women brought down specifically because of their beauty and the confidence and hopes it gives them, and the naivety it hides from them. (also was aware of a conspicuous non-presence of sex in how their lives are told to us, which i’m usually not conscious of in novels of this period, but victorian prudish silence feels more bug than feature for the stories eliot wants to tell, which i think speaks to how ambitious and modern these women feel as characters.) and then you have the eponymous man, who’s good and honest and insightful, despite some flawed reactions, and the secondary woman, who has faith and is basically perfect.

and also both books imo become much less compelling with the backseating of their beautiful fools. i think eliot sees both their stories through stirringly, but my god the damage resolving the lives of these eponymous men does to her endings… society if george eliot named her books after these women and thereby centred them instead… i am fading into silence because i dont want to talk about the other half of the book…

the thing about me is i always think i am going to have special insight and i’ll be able to see what all those other people missed. but no, they were right. the jewish stuff in this sucks in comparison to the rest of it. the zionism is grim, but long before that the damage is done. i like mirah well enough, although she’s embarrassingly thin compared to gwendolen, but she’s mostly interesting because of her strange life, and as an element in the weird emotional snarl between gwendolen and daniel, which is also the best thing about his plot. this isn’t because i’m such a gwendolen head, but because i think this novel is at its most compelling in its emotional work, and in exploring the huge impact of seemingly everyday glances, meetings, feelings, responsibilities.

what doesn’t work is mordecai. this book is a victorian novel in pretty standard ways for about 450 pages, and then suddenly deronda’s on a quest, he has fated bonds, he’s a hidden heir, recognised despite not knowing his upbringing, there’s a chest of mystery parchment– he’s in a fantasy narrative except the magic land he’s to inherit is israel!! it’s insane. and the fantastical nature of this is acknowledged too: ‘it was as far from Gwendolen's conception that Deronda's life could be determined by the historical destiny of the Jews, as that he could rise into the air on a brazen horse, and so vanish from her horizon in the form of a twinkling star.’ until then, eliot does a fairly good job of rendering the kind of prejudices jewish people face in england at that time, not least through deronda, who’s got this interesting disgust he has to unlearn, in what seems to be setting up a fairly mature discussion about it. and then it lapses into this. and the fantasy is not even interesting: it’s so dense and mordecai speaks so exclusively in proselytising and period philosophy, and it’s all conducted in poorly lit rooms (i imagine). deronda finding out about his parentage? interesting. deronda immediately being like yipee modercai? deadening.

so. the two parts of the book fit together strangely, almost surreally, but i dont actually have an issue with that: i actually found gwendolen and deronda’s uneven thoughts towards each other compelling, and i think there’s a reasonable point made about the sort of many lives lived in society. but i wish the halves weren’t so completely uneven and out of balance, and that they were better matched in the interest they held, and the skill with which they’re rendered. but the gwendolen parts are so impressive. i hope she was ok after the close of the novel. i believe she was. i hope daniel falls off a boat.

i had fun! comfort dragons! retreads some of the same ground of the rest of the trilogy, but is also distinguished because this one’s a spy novel!

bad! commits two insurmountable sins:
1) it’s extremely inaccurate. i think it’s one thing to have anachronistic dialogue in standard regency romance (i can deal with that, i got through all of bridgerton)(although this does have some egregious moments, even by that standard), but by evoking pride and prejudice it sets itself up as for the austen weirdos, who have watched the adaptions and read  the books and will be attuned to turns of phrase! i think if you’re going to write/edit a book like this, it’s your solemn duty to do your homework, and adapt your ear to this stuff! it’s not that hard to do, which i know, because i’ve apparently done it, and every odd phrase sounded like an alarm bell in the middle of a sentence. worse than all of that, though, is the misuse of modern slang, and making english characters say americanisms, purely because they would have been so easy to fix, during a just slightly conscious edit. tldr, i wish they’d gotten just one period drama lover, one british person and one 20 year old to read through the book before publishing it. 
2) it’s not even a little bit based on pride and prejudice. the gall, of attempting to elevate ur regency romance above the wide and churning sea of that subgenre, by evoking its urtext in the title, and then not having the story have anything to do with austen, is staggering! the closest it gets is a man does a lake dip, which a reference to mere supplementary material. i think the titling is actually extremely rude to the authors working hard to make their historical fiction stand out with tension and chemistry. although i guess the lie worked, because i read this, and i wouldn’t have otherwise. 

also and this doesnt really bother me, but there’s not much pittsburgh either, so the title is just false advertising from start to eventual finish

gets soooo good after plot kicks in on page 750. and once that happens, the lead-up feels justified, honest.
the thing about dickens, i think, and i say that as someone still amateur at reading him, is that he obviously writes a lot of zany characters, but he embeds them so entirely in lively contexts - particularly families, but also friends and homes and little touches of character and turns of phrase - that you have no choice to remember that the real world is also composed of zany characters, most people being a little weird, which ultimately means that, more than a comedic tick, these characters become a site of actual empathy and reflections of reality, just sort of magnified.
the writing in this feels so modern, or at least not victorian, at times, particularly in the omniscient narrator bits with all their fragmented sentences. some gorgeous, surprising descriptions and evocations. i consistently would have rather been reading about esther - i got very lost in the labyrinth of court hanger-oners and shady shop keepers - but it's really something to read.

i liked it in flashes: dickens, poets of nyc and urban walking, women’s walking, but otherwise i found the density of information and the vagueness it often spins off into, a little tricky as a style

this would be a really solid introduction to the concept of literary heritage sites: it’s got a good bibliography, and leads you efficiently through the concepts. unfortunately i’ve already read all the other books on the subject, so it got a little dull. i’d have liked to see a list of where macleod visited too, because there was some commentary which felt like assumptions based on not-visiting. still, it was affirming in its lack of surprises: i know what i’m talking about with this, my area of expertise.