I Go By Sea, I Go By Land, P. L. Travers (365 Books, Day 253)

Borrowed from nineweaving, with thanks.

This is a curate's egg of a book: parts of it are still good. Other parts not so much.

But the whole is of great historical value, because it is a contemporary account of a story that does not, I think, get told much these days. Certainly it does not get told much in America. In the U.S. one can grow up reading British children's books, and then one hears about children being evacuated to the countryside during the air raids of the Battle of Britain, but one does not hear much about the ones who were evacuated all the way to the U.S. and Canada.

Sabrina, whose diary this purports to be, and her brother James, are sent to upstate New York to stay with family friends. They are eleven and eight, old enough to know perfectly well that they may never see their parents, or England, again, and to know that the boat they travel on could be attacked, but not old enough to internalize that if the boat sinks it could kill them. It's an interesting age to have as the narrator, because of course the adults spend a fair amount of time talking over Sabrina, but also a fair amount of time talking to her, as she is a bright eleven. The intersection of what she hears and understands, hears and doesn't understand, is told and doesn't understand: this is all beautifully done.

There's the boat, which is the first half, and then there is settling into America. They are privileged children in both portions and nearly know it, privileged on the boat because they are traveling with a family friend (who is evacuating with her newborn son) and can afford to pay for a cabin, privileged on the land because they are going to friends who know their parents and are loving and generous. It goes as well as this sort of thing can go. It does not hurt them any less for that.

The problem, though, is that I cannot quite buy many of the aspects of Sabrina as narrator. She is a bit too naive, sometimes, a bit too knowing at others, and I can see too much of what the author thinks a Very Nice Girl should be like inside. And her diary is full of cute misspellings which is maddening and distracting and aggravating and just a bad idea. Things also maybe go a little too easily for them, a little too nicely. There is more than a minor touch of the Mary Sue, and also Sabrina and her brother behave a bit more rambunctiously than the way they think about things would indicate they should.

There is a good reason for that last, though, which is that the author had the opportunity to observe their outside behavior, but not their interior thoughts. She was the family friend with the baby who took them across the Atlantic, famous already as an author-- there is a moment where a Red Cross lady recognizes her and suddenly takes them all home to lunch instead of issuing them Red Cross food. Travers clearly loves these children (I am sure they were lovable) and therefore makes their faults ones the readers will, she hopes, find charming. (She is wrong.)

More of value as history than as fiction, then, I'd say, although still very readable (except those damn misspellings). Also be warned: this came out in 1941, and contains in it the attitudes towards people of color which one might regretfully expect of that era. It is not nasty-- as you may remember if you have ever read an unedited copy of Mary Poppins, Travers dealt in stereotypes which she intended to be polite and kind, rather than in Not Our Sort, Dear-- but the white people in this book have an unexamined deep sense that they are superior and that is all. Ah well, on this subject books fall into the categories of bad for its era, standard for its era, and good for its era. This is very much standard.

I am not sure why this fell thoroughly out of Children's Books That Get Reprinted when a lot of the rest of Travers still firmly sits there, but it does seem to be quite obscure. Unless everyone read it but me. It's probably the cuteness. I have no particular explanation otherwise as I was certainly given far worse things to read as a kid, and less educational. Not remotely as good as the Mary Poppins books, though.

Travers has gone onto my list of people I should read a biography of, because I find upon Googling that she did not die until, good heavens, 1996. 1899-1996, and first published by A.E., and a friend of Yeats. I had no idea. Now that must have been a life, and I am curious.

I Go By Sea, I Go By Land, P. L. Travers (365 Books, Day 253)

Borrowed from nineweaving, with thanks.

This is a curate's egg of a book: parts of it are still good. Other parts not so much.

But the whole is of great historical value, because it is a contemporary account of a story that does not, I think, get told much these days. Certainly it does not get told much in America. In the U.S. one can grow up reading British children's books, and then one hears about children being evacuated to the countryside during the air raids of the Battle of Britain, but one does not hear much about the ones who were evacuated all the way to the U.S. and Canada.

Sabrina, whose diary this purports to be, and her brother James, are sent to upstate New York to stay with family friends. They are eleven and eight, old enough to know perfectly well that they may never see their parents, or England, again, and to know that the boat they travel on could be attacked, but not old enough to internalize that if the boat sinks it could kill them. It's an interesting age to have as the narrator, because of course the adults spend a fair amount of time talking over Sabrina, but also a fair amount of time talking to her, as she is a bright eleven. The intersection of what she hears and understands, hears and doesn't understand, is told and doesn't understand: this is all beautifully done.

There's the boat, which is the first half, and then there is settling into America. They are privileged children in both portions and nearly know it, privileged on the boat because they are traveling with a family friend (who is evacuating with her newborn son) and can afford to pay for a cabin, privileged on the land because they are going to friends who know their parents and are loving and generous. It goes as well as this sort of thing can go. It does not hurt them any less for that.

The problem, though, is that I cannot quite buy many of the aspects of Sabrina as narrator. She is a bit too naive, sometimes, a bit too knowing at others, and I can see too much of what the author thinks a Very Nice Girl should be like inside. And her diary is full of cute misspellings which is maddening and distracting and aggravating and just a bad idea. Things also maybe go a little too easily for them, a little too nicely. There is more than a minor touch of the Mary Sue, and also Sabrina and her brother behave a bit more rambunctiously than the way they think about things would indicate they should.

There is a good reason for that last, though, which is that the author had the opportunity to observe their outside behavior, but not their interior thoughts. She was the family friend with the baby who took them across the Atlantic, famous already as an author-- there is a moment where a Red Cross lady recognizes her and suddenly takes them all home to lunch instead of issuing them Red Cross food. Travers clearly loves these children (I am sure they were lovable) and therefore makes their faults ones the readers will, she hopes, find charming. (She is wrong.)

More of value as history than as fiction, then, I'd say, although still very readable (except those damn misspellings). Also be warned: this came out in 1941, and contains in it the attitudes towards people of color which one might regretfully expect of that era. It is not nasty-- as you may remember if you have ever read an unedited copy of Mary Poppins, Travers dealt in stereotypes which she intended to be polite and kind, rather than in Not Our Sort, Dear-- but the white people in this book have an unexamined deep sense that they are superior and that is all. Ah well, on this subject books fall into the categories of bad for its era, standard for its era, and good for its era. This is very much standard.

I am not sure why this fell thoroughly out of Children's Books That Get Reprinted when a lot of the rest of Travers still firmly sits there, but it does seem to be quite obscure. Unless everyone read it but me. It's probably the cuteness. I have no particular explanation otherwise as I was certainly given far worse things to read as a kid, and less educational. Not remotely as good as the Mary Poppins books, though.

Travers has gone onto my list of people I should read a biography of, because I find upon Googling that she did not die until, good heavens, 1996. 1899-1996, and first published by A.E., and a friend of Yeats. I had no idea. Now that must have been a life, and I am curious.

You can comment here or at the Dreamwidth crosspost. There are comments over there.

The Boats of the Glen Carrig, William Hope Hodgson (365 Books, Day 254)

I sometimes think that the authors of reference books may not be fully aware of the awesome responsibility they have taken on: which is that a certain sort of bookish child, when encountering a reference book that seems at all good, will laboriously go through and find absolutely everything that it refers to, or mentions in the bibliography, on the grounds that this is clearly How One Is Meant To Use Reference Books. Which is not to say that it isn't-- only the writers of reference books do not, I think, expect you to do it. Otherwise a great many more people would have read at least some William Hope Hodgson. Lovecraft tells you to, after all, and as an adolescent I would read anything Lovecraft told me to*, which is why I occasionally have the literary tastes of someone who began reading seriously in the Mauve Decade. It seems obligatory to talk about Hodgson in articles on the history of horror and early fantasy and what not, but I don't run into a lot of people who read the books. (If I am wrong on this let me know! I would love to be wrong.)

Mind you, there are perfectly good reasons not to read William Hope Hodgson. The best way I have of describing The Night Land, for example, is that it is like reading the greatest novel of the sheerly eerie weird ever written, the one that is so inexplicable and yet so badass that you will never get a single image from it out of your head ever again, through a tightly-meshed fishing net in which someone has painstakingly knotted stray bits of broken glass. That net is the hideous tin-eared pseudo-archaic language. ("And," sovay said, thoughtfully, in conversation, "the net is made partially out of the King James Bible, but not the good bits." Yes.) My edition of The Night Land is the two-volume reprint by Lin Carter, from which he slashed several thousand words of terrible Victorian slushily pink maudlin wibbling romance, because he thought it was too awful to inflict on the readers.

I repeat: Lin Carter, a man who wrote a series with a protagonist called, and I am not making this up, THONGOR LORD OF LEMURIA, thought that this book was TOO TIN-EARED NOT TO REVISE. I love the book, I reread it every so often, and my cast of mind during it can be summarized as 'this is awesomely amazingly wonderful, why the fuck do I do this to myself again?'.

I do not suggest trying to read the uncut Night Land. It only wastes your time and annoys the pig.

Seriously, though, one of the greatest novels ever written, as long as you put your fingers in your ears every so often and go LA LA LA I CAN MANAGE. And The House on the Borderland, while not in great prose, should be perfectly readable to anybody, and I highly recommend it.

This one, The Boats of the Glen Carrig, is Hodgson's first novel, drawing directly on his experiences at sea in the earlier part of his life, and it is not in the genre I usually expect from him, namely dark fantasy edging on horror. There's very little that is supernatural here, and almost nothing that really has to be except that crabs don't grow that big. It is mostly a competent, workmanlike, and atmospheric thriller set in a world in which all the myths about the Sargasso Sea are absolutely true.

The protagonist and his party are in lifeboats following the wreck of their vessel somewhere in the south Atlantic, and keep washing up in various places in a frying-pan-to-fire sort of way. The very first place they make landfall is probably the most interesting, a giant mudflat full of inexplicable noises which can be summed up in some ways as 'R'lyeh if it had just happened instead of being built by anything intelligent' (remember, Lovecraft read these), but the island they spend the most time on has an interesting combination of killer cuttlefish, giant crabs, and Life Not As We Know It going on. There's not much in the way of characterization, but this is a great entry in the Man Uses Stuff genre-- you know, we must fight off this crab the size of a table using only the following six items it has been previously mentioned we have in the lifeboat, plausibly and in a manner somebody would think of in a hurry, that sort of deal. The physical realities of food, water, fire, and shiprigging are ingeniously done and always feel completely real, and with that and the attacks by various monsters Hodgson has wound up with a consistently entertaining book which never lags for a second.

The language, although intentionally archaicized, is not archaicized to be from a period as far back as he tries to fake in other works, so it's clunky but nowhere near as terrible as he can get. But then I don't know, I have such a readability threshold with Hodgson because I know what he is capable of, so persons unfamiliar with him might find this more annoying.

I do recommend this to people who don't usually like horror or suspense, though, because due to the era in which it was written it has a much lower body count than this sort of book would nowadays, and feels much more like a survival-on-an-environmentally-hostile-planet piece of SF than I would ever have expected.

Now of the novels I've only not read The Ghost Pirates. The title is promising.



* If anyone can tell me, for a fact, with citations, whether Lovecraft read Moby-Dick and what he thought of it I will bake you brownies, seriously. It doesn't say in Supernatural Horror in Literature, I can't afford the complete collected letters, and I really want to know because Moby-Dick by my lights is the great novel HPL would have wanted to write.

The Boats of the Glen Carrig, William Hope Hodgson (365 Books, Day 254)

I sometimes think that the authors of reference books may not be fully aware of the awesome responsibility they have taken on: which is that a certain sort of bookish child, when encountering a reference book that seems at all good, will laboriously go through and find absolutely everything that it refers to, or mentions in the bibliography, on the grounds that this is clearly How One Is Meant To Use Reference Books. Which is not to say that it isn't-- only the writers of reference books do not, I think, expect you to do it. Otherwise a great many more people would have read at least some William Hope Hodgson. Lovecraft tells you to, after all, and as an adolescent I would read anything Lovecraft told me to*, which is why I occasionally have the literary tastes of someone who began reading seriously in the Mauve Decade. It seems obligatory to talk about Hodgson in articles on the history of horror and early fantasy and what not, but I don't run into a lot of people who read the books. (If I am wrong on this let me know! I would love to be wrong.)

Mind you, there are perfectly good reasons not to read William Hope Hodgson. The best way I have of describing The Night Land, for example, is that it is like reading the greatest novel of the sheerly eerie weird ever written, the one that is so inexplicable and yet so badass that you will never get a single image from it out of your head ever again, through a tightly-meshed fishing net in which someone has painstakingly knotted stray bits of broken glass. That net is the hideous tin-eared pseudo-archaic language. ("And," sovay said, thoughtfully, in conversation, "the net is made partially out of the King James Bible, but not the good bits." Yes.) My edition of The Night Land is the two-volume reprint by Lin Carter, from which he slashed several thousand words of terrible Victorian slushily pink maudlin wibbling romance, because he thought it was too awful to inflict on the readers.

I repeat: Lin Carter, a man who wrote a series with a protagonist called, and I am not making this up, THONGOR LORD OF LEMURIA, thought that this book was TOO TIN-EARED NOT TO REVISE. I love the book, I reread it every so often, and my cast of mind during it can be summarized as 'this is awesomely amazingly wonderful, why the fuck do I do this to myself again?'.

I do not suggest trying to read the uncut Night Land. It only wastes your time and annoys the pig.

Seriously, though, one of the greatest novels ever written, as long as you put your fingers in your ears every so often and go LA LA LA I CAN MANAGE. And The House on the Borderland, while not in great prose, should be perfectly readable to anybody, and I highly recommend it.

This one, The Boats of the Glen Carrig, is Hodgson's first novel, drawing directly on his experiences at sea in the earlier part of his life, and it is not in the genre I usually expect from him, namely dark fantasy edging on horror. There's very little that is supernatural here, and almost nothing that really has to be except that crabs don't grow that big. It is mostly a competent, workmanlike, and atmospheric thriller set in a world in which all the myths about the Sargasso Sea are absolutely true.

The protagonist and his party are in lifeboats following the wreck of their vessel somewhere in the south Atlantic, and keep washing up in various places in a frying-pan-to-fire sort of way. The very first place they make landfall is probably the most interesting, a giant mudflat full of inexplicable noises which can be summed up in some ways as 'R'lyeh if it had just happened instead of being built by anything intelligent' (remember, Lovecraft read these), but the island they spend the most time on has an interesting combination of killer cuttlefish, giant crabs, and Life Not As We Know It going on. There's not much in the way of characterization, but this is a great entry in the Man Uses Stuff genre-- you know, we must fight off this crab the size of a table using only the following six items it has been previously mentioned we have in the lifeboat, plausibly and in a manner somebody would think of in a hurry, that sort of deal. The physical realities of food, water, fire, and shiprigging are ingeniously done and always feel completely real, and with that and the attacks by various monsters Hodgson has wound up with a consistently entertaining book which never lags for a second.

The language, although intentionally archaicized, is not archaicized to be from a period as far back as he tries to fake in other works, so it's clunky but nowhere near as terrible as he can get. But then I don't know, I have such a readability threshold with Hodgson because I know what he is capable of, so persons unfamiliar with him might find this more annoying.

I do recommend this to people who don't usually like horror or suspense, though, because due to the era in which it was written it has a much lower body count than this sort of book would nowadays, and feels much more like a survival-on-an-environmentally-hostile-planet piece of SF than I would ever have expected.

Now of the novels I've only not read The Ghost Pirates. The title is promising.



* If anyone can tell me, for a fact, with citations, whether Lovecraft read Moby-Dick and what he thought of it I will bake you brownies, seriously. It doesn't say in Supernatural Horror in Literature, I can't afford the complete collected letters, and I really want to know because Moby-Dick by my lights is the great novel HPL would have wanted to write.

You can comment here or at the Dreamwidth crosspost. There are comments over there.