Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling

Well, it's back to the cradle with this one.  I have fond memories of my first year of schooling.  Mrs W., my teacher, read one of the Kipling stories to my class every week until the book was finished.  I have a vivid recollection of the images my mind conjured up as she read "How the Whale Got His Throat".  It really was a magical time in my life, when I was so open to the wonders of the world and so eager for stories.  If I had to point to the origins of my love of reading, I think the pairing of Mrs W. and Just So Stories would be near the top of the list.

I was a bit worried about revisiting this book.  Would I be spoiling precious childhood memories by viewing the book with my now adult and, possibly, jaundiced mind?  I need not have worried.  Re-reading Just So Stories brought back a sense of the thrill of being told a tale.  

Just So Stories is a collection of 'origin stories'.  Kipling steered clear of explaining the origins of the more obvious things, like the sun and the moon or thunder and lightning.  Instead, he concentrated on more whimsical topics such as camel humps, leopard spots and elephant trunks, giving each of his explanations a highly inventive twist.  The Just So Stories are populated with talking animals, gods and highly unusual humans, yet Kipling is able to keep the reader engaged in their hijinks in such an intriguing, riddling and charming way that the suspension of disbelief is never a trial on the reader's part.  And each tale is brimming with adventure and good humour. The book is also liberally sprinkled with illustrations by the author.

If you have never read these delightful tales, and if your inner-child is still alive and well, then you could worse than to read this book.

Just So Stories was first published in 1902.  I read an e-book version. Review.

John Halifax, Gentleman by Mrs Craik

You have got to love a book that has the word 'sunshiny' in it, not once but nine times.  And if you are into sunshiny statistics, Louisa May Alcott managed to use the word seven times in the course of seven novels; Robert Louis Stevenson and Charles Dickens used it at least twice each, and George Eliot used it at least once.  (Statistics courtesy of The Ministry of Useless Information).

John Halifax, Gentleman is a bildungsroman, a novel that tells the story of an individual as they develop from childhood to maturity.  (See Jane Eyre).  It is also a David and Jonathan story.

John Halifax is an orphan boy.  He is used to sleeping rough as he moves about the countryside looking for work.  John will not beg and only takes what he can get from honest work.  In the town of Norton Bury, John gets hired by Abel Fletcher and begins to learn the tanning trade.

He befriends Abel's son Phineas (the story's narrator) and becomes a David to Phineas' Jonathan.  Got that? John becomes David and Phineas becomes Jon. We follow the two friends as they stick together throughout their lives: Phineas as a bachelor invalid and John as an ever-prosperous and influential businessman, community leader and family man.  Their troubles are many, and each problem is met with Christian fortitude and large doses of common decency.  

I really enjoyed John Halifax, Gentleman.  Admittedly, it can be construed as a sort of Mills and Boon novel for Victorian times; however, there is a depth and breadth to the themes present in this book that goes way beyond a boy-meets-girl story.  It is all in there:  life and death, joy and sorrow, health and sickness, poverty and prosperity, malice and love.  Any theme that Mrs Craik introduces is explored well and never cursorily.  Through Phineas the narrator she allows us to peer into the hearts of the characters of Norton Bury, and all is bathed in the light of Christian love and moral integrity.  I think in this respect John Halifax, Gentleman is a warmer and more gladdening book than Jane Eyre.  Well worth the effort.

John Halifax, Gentleman was first published in 1856.  I read an e-book version. Review.

Hugo (2011) Directed by Martin Scorsese

Hugo is an orphaned child living in Paris in the 1930s.  After the death of his father he lives with his alcoholic uncle in a forgotten apartment in the Gare Montparnasse railway station where he learns to maintain the railway station's numerous public clocks.  After his uncle's mysterious disappearance, Hugo continues maintaining the clocks.  In his spare time, he tries unsuccessfully to repair a silver automaton his father had salvaged from a museum.  Hugo becomes involved in the lives of an old toymaker and his granddaughter.  They seem to have some connection with the automaton.  Can Hugo get their help to complete the repairs before he is caught by the officious Station Inspector and sent to an orphanage?

I wanted to like this movie, I really did; despite the almost universal praise the movie has received in the press, I find I am in the minority.  

Hugo is a long and slow movie, and its tale is not well told.  We are given no real reasons to care for the main characters initially, and the information that really counts in this respect comes far too late in the movie.  The incidental characters are the most sympathetic, but too little time is devoted to them for them to matter.  There is a lot of repetition of scenes that neither advance the plot nor develop the main characters.  The actors' efforts are competent but not outstanding, and there is little to remember in either the characters or their portrayal.

On the other hand, the sets and the cinematography are excellent, and clockwork is always nice to look at (but even that becomes boring after a while).  Technique is vital to any artistic enterprise, but no amount of good technique will rescue an underdone plot or underdone acting and directing.  If only Scorsese had got to the heart of his characters right from the start and also had cut 30 minutes from the movie, perhaps then Hugo would have truly merited its nomination for the Best Picture Academy Award.

King Solomon's Mines by H. Rider Haggard

The year is (presumably) 1884.  Sir Henry Curtis contacts the adventurer Allan Quatermain and explains that his brother has gone missing in Africa while looking for the fabled diamond mines of King Solomon.  Sir Henry has a 300 year old map and a lot of money (plus a share in any profits) which he is willing to give to Quatermain in exchange for his help in finding the mines and his brother.  Quatermain agrees to help, and with Captain Good joining the party, the three go to Africa.  After many hardships they arrive in the unexplored region of Kukuanaland only to find a lot of tribal trouble.  Will they survive, find the mines, get the diamonds and return to England as fabulously wealthy men?

King Solomon's Mines is an unashamedly boy's own adventure. Indeed, Rider Haggard dedicates the book "To all the big and little boys who read it".  As we have come to expect from such tales, the action is fast-paced, the next crisis is never far away and there are certainly a lot of them.  However, I wouldn't be the first to say that King Solomon's Mines suffers from it's own success.  There have been so many imitations of Haggard's tropes in more recent books and film that what was once novel is now cliche.

So what attractions does this book have for the modern reader?  Firstly, there is the masterful storytelling.  Quatermain is the narrator of the story, and his voice is measured, assured but capable of becoming lively and comic.  He has an eye for detail and a talent for description, and he is able judge situations and temperaments with great accuracy.

Secondly, there is Haggard's treatment of his themes and characters.  We must remember that he was writing in Victorian times and that sentiments were different then.  Even so, he still has Quatermain condemning the sentiments that underlie the word 'nigger' well before political correctness condemned it, yet he blithely uses 'Cafir'  often and without any prejudicial overtones (these words are in the text, folks).  

The native Africans are not portrayed by one overmastering stereotype but are still stereotyped.  The sympathetic ones tend to be loyal, even to the point of being (literally) self-sacrificing; the bad ones are violent, even to the point of being psychopathic.  But the one we really get to know well, Umbopa, is an unstereotypically complex and challenging personality on par with any of the Englishmen he travels with.

Controversially, Haggard inserts a blossoming inter-racial romance in his story.  Of course, it is doomed by the workings of a deus ex machina.  Let us not forget that it was not that long ago that the inter-racial romance in The King and I was killed by the scriptwriter before it could be consummated.  Or that one had to be on the Starship Enterprise in order to be involved in television's first inter-racial kiss.  So hats off to Haggard for being way ahead of his time.

I enjoyed this book even though adventure is not my genre of choice.  It can be enjoyed for itself, being a rollicking tale, or for its being a testament to times and attitudes that now seem so remote.

King Solomon's Mines was first published in 1885.  I read an e-book version.