46 We Have Always Lived in the Castle

Shirley Jackson’s novel We Have Always Lived in the Castle raises questions like: what if my little sister was a murderous psychopath? And: how burned down does a house have to be before we’ll move out? And: Why do the villagers hate our family so much?

The last question is because of the first one, really. Merricat poisoned most of her family and killed them. It’s not even really clear why. Because she got sent to bed without any supper? What had she done? None of that matters because Merricat is the narrator so we see what she sees. She hates and fears the villagers because they hate and fear her. She loves Constance, her older sister, who doesn’t like sugar on blackberries and so did not get poisoned, and Uncle Julian, who only got poisoned a little, so is stuck in a wheelchair with his mind wandering.

It’s Cousin Charles she hates the most. He comes sniffing around after the family money and after Constance. Merricat wrecks his room, and when he sends her to bed without any supper, she drops the lit pipe he left upstairs into a wastepaper basket full of newspapers, setting the house on fire, burning the upper floor, but getting rid of Charles, so it was worth it.

Jackson excels at letting people’s secret savagery out. She gives us incredibly nosy and inappropriate visitors, outrageously rude villagers, a fire chief who puts the fire out then throws a rock and smashes a window in the house he just saved, a raging mob of villagers who smash and destroy everything in the house they can get their hands on. But most of all she gives us Merricat, who calmly says that she wishes these people were dead—and that she would walk on their bodies.

What if we said what we actually thought and acted on our real feelings? What if we stopped being civilized?

This is a huge book to tackle and I still don’t know quite how to feel about it. I love an unreliable narrator so much, especially a true psychopath. And I love a Gothic house and a town that loses control of itself.

Other texts mentioned: The Esker Road, of course. The Last Word. Summerlands. Sarah Dessen’s Dreamland. I thought about Laurie Halse Anderson’s novels, especially Speak. Judy Blume’s novels. Lois Duncan. It’s no wonder therapists say that most of their job is getting people to say the things that need to be said.

 

45 I Capture the Castle

This 1949 novel is one of the best ever. Do yourself a favor and read it before I talk about it.

It seems criminal that I'm not writing a book about a giant unwieldy house while reading this. How could it be?

I adore this book, then I got all mad at the ending, then when I went over it again, I had misread it—the ending is exactly right. Hurray!

Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle is overtly a retelling of Pride and Prejudice except instead of being about either of those things, it’s about genteel poverty and what it’s okay to do to get out of it.

The poverty is no joke in this book. Get ready to appreciate your fridge and pantry, as well as electricity and hot and cold running water. And that closet full of clothes. The characters deal with it, but aren’t about that, really, any more than the Bennets are about being on the edge of homelessness at any moment, if anything happens to Mr. Bennet. It’s huge and central to their lives, but they are about so much more.

Cassandra is one of literature’s best characters. The book is her journals about the time when “Pemberley is let at last,” as they actually joke in the book. Two eligible wealthy young men move into the neighborhood. They actually own the house and castle where Cassandra and her family are failing to pay the rent and going cold and hungry. Quite a setup.

Cassandra’s voice and interpretations of events are what make this a fabulous book. 

Other topics broached: We Have Always Lived in the Castle, the podcast Do You Need a Ride?, The Last Word, Castle Full of Trees, probably others.

Sacred cheese of life!

 

 

The Esker Road

I'm naming the Becca book The Esker Road, so there, it finally has a title after what, a year and a half? It has had many titles through its previous incarnations, but they were all terrible, so let's forget them.

At one point I had named Becca Saxony, but it kept on evoking medieval maps. 

Once upon a time this book was set on Mount Desert Island, with a J.K. Rowling type author (minus the HATE) up in a mansion on top of one of the inhabited peaks near the shore, with the teen heroine living in a nearly abandoned house built by her dad (now divorced and gone) with a funicular up the mountain from the town where she went to school and where her exhausted mom worked. And there were toddler quintuplets she had to babysit, I believe.

Anyway that might have to get written on its own one of these days. It's all part of the story about a girl avoiding reality by obsessing over a fictional world, see. 

Quintuplet toddlers that a teen took care of full time. I'd escape too.

ANYWAY the town of Esker is the center of the Eskerverse (right???) in which so many of these novels are set. 

I just read Jellicoe Road and oh boy is The Esker Road a cousin twice removed who nevertheless bears a strong resemblance. It's like if I Am the Cheese and Jellicoe Road and the Thrushcross books all spawned an offspring together. 

Amazing what I can write into a book that clearly comes from another book but that I've forgotten entirely. Like it's all in my brain, to the point that I had elements straight out of these books, but I didn't remember where they came from, or worse, that they even came from anywhere else.

So take that, authorial intentionality. Nyah. I told you it was nonsense. You can plan to drive from Maine to Los Angeles, or vice versa, but you can't plan what will happen along the way. 

Look, Maine. So Mainey!

 

44 Jellicoe Road

Jellicoe Road is a novel by Melina Marchetta. It will ruin you, but in a good way. Also it's so complicated that you don't understand what's actually happening until the end, much like Code Name Verity. Half of the characters have two different names, one in the past and one in the present. But the past absolutely informs the lives of the important characters in the present. It's not really even over. 

This book gives me such a feeling of tragedy, in the big epic classical sense. 

We'll see how I do with it. 

I was thinking about it because I named the Becca book The Esker Road finally. You know how roads are named for where they're going, at least around here? I think it's widespread but who knows. Well, the town of Esker is where all this action goes on, where the University is, the nearest town above a crossroads to Thrushcross. 

Books that take place in and around the town of Esker, Maine:

The Nerve

Leaving Thrushcross

Mazewood

Summerlands

The Esker Road

I'm in love with eskers. I go out of my way to drive along one over on Stetson Road, or rather Stetson Road runs along the top of an esker. I thought so--but then I met a geologist whose dog is named Esker and asked just to be sure. And it's true! Hurray! Also Esker is a terrific dog. 

I've gotten into some deep dark areas in this past week's writing of The Esker Road. But also the writing has been absolutely fantastic. I'm so pleased with it. Though I was a little startled to see how many elements have not so distant cousins in Jellicoe Road, as well as in I Am the Cheese. Borrow from the best, I guess. It's its own thing, have no fear.

Anyway please do read Jellicoe Road if you possibly can. I bet it's out there in ebook.  

 

43 Jupiter Ascending

It's dystopian space opera with a happy ending, right? That fits the bill. 

I'm still trying to invent a show for my character to become obsessed with.

This movie has so many serious problems. It's really not good, but it's amazing anyway. Take the main character, for example. She gets sucked into this giant drama but plays almost no role in its resolution. She's the most passive heroine ever. This isn't a character-driven story, at least not on her part. You could argue that the wolf man Caine's character drives it much more than she does. 

It is a DELIGHTFUL movie to watch because of the flying and diving and falling and swooping through the air, because of the larger than life villains who are fighting with each other, because of the gorgeous settings and costumes and beautifully imagined scenarios, but most of all because of Caine rollerblading through the sky and moving with such profound grace and strength.

He gets wings at the end. It's AMAZING. But even up to that point, he's fabulous to watch. 

The story is daft, much of it makes no sense, and as mentioned the heroine is practically passive the whole time. She seems half asleep. She wakes up enough to make a feeble protest here and there, that's all. 

If I were teaching screenwriting, I'd use this movie to illustrate how not to write a character. There is nothing there at all where she's supposed to be. Truly, she has almost no traits. She gets pushed around by everyone, manipulated, bullied, anesthetized, dressed while unconscious, pushed off buildings, and saved. She barely does anything and almost never even makes a choice. She starts to try to choose with the terrible brothers Titus and Balem, but it's all for nothing because of manipulation and gets rescued anyway.

My first novel was the exact same way. Passive, reactive character. Brr, awful. 

The positive side to a zero character like this is that your audience can put themselves in her place with no effort at all. They don't have to match up or anything, just exist.

Somehow she saves the world in the end, but how?

Mostly I remember that Caine is gorgeous and devoted to her and can fly, so a dream character, obviously. Now Caine has a backstory and motivation and angst and so on, where Jupiter has essentially nothing. She wants a telescope because her father had one? She has no internal motivation or desires of her own at all, except of course for Caine.

Compare Jupiter to any actual heroine like Katniss Everdeen and it becomes obvious that there's nothing there.

Anyway, dystopian space opera for sure. There are whole extended blocks about each villain, a sketch of a plot, scenery-chewing soliloquies, insane costumes, dramatic destruction of the bad guys. 

Now I wonder whether space opera is always somewhat dystopian? Having conflict is not the same thing as dystopia, though. 

Look at this! The crowning moment of the movie is when Caine gets his wings in the very last scene. That character has an arc and a moment of triumph. I wish they'd written Jupiter that way, too.

Note: recording in the living room meant TERRIBLE audio quality. I'll never do it again!

42 Farscape and Space Opera

Farscape is one of my favorite shows of all time. Historically it went Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, then Farscape, then Battlestar Galactica. I've been moderately into Agents of SHIELD over the past however many years, but not to that same depth. Look! I'm a total sci-fi nerd! We know this. 

Farscape is space opera while the others are not. What is space opera? I get into that in the episode.

What does space opera do for you? That's a much more interesting question. 

I'm looking into this for the imaginary show that Becca is obsessed with in the Becca book. It matters so much what your character is super into, especially when she's going to get to meet the actors and writers and all. What are they making and why? So I did a lot of thinking about that here.

In the end I kind of talked myself out of using this type of show, though. I actually think she should be into a dystopian space opera, if that's a thing. I came up with two examples: Mad Max Fury Road and Jupiter Ascending. I'm not sure about the latter, though. And I haven't seen the former. But it's literally on top of the DVD player right at this moment, under the Battlestar and Farscape DVDs. 

I want her to have a dystopia because she has a very dark view of the world, what with how everyone has let her down all the time. And my students are heavily into the books of The Hunger Games series. This is a time when dystopias reflect our world.

I wonder if Andor is a dystopian space opera? I feel like there's generally a glam element to space opera, but I doubt it's a requirement. 

By the end of Farscape you had everyone in squeaky black leather and these insane aliens standing on tables and just the most outrageous things going on. It's a show very well worth looking into if you haven't seen it.

Also I think I called Scorpius "Scorpio" which is a ridiculous mistake to make but oh well!