Rilla Of Ingleside, By L.M. Montgomery

Rilla of Ingleside, by L.M. Montgomery

I've taken a break from reading Montgomery's collected works because this felt like a good place to pause. Technically, this is the last book in the Anne series, although Montgomery went on to write more books covering the years of Anne's life we didn't see. Like Rainbow Valley, this book has little to do with Anne specifically. Rilla is the ostensible heroine, but for much of the book Rilla's coming-of-age feels like an afterthought. Writing from the perspective of a young girl is kind of Montgomery's calling card, but here it feels almost mechanical. Rilla is unlike Anne (and unlike all FIVE of her siblings) in that she's not ambitious; while everyone else is teaching and going to college, she's thinking about how much fun it will be to go to parties and wear pretty clothes and have a bunch of boyfriends. Unfortunately for her, World War I shows up and changes everything.

All of Montgomery's books are describing actual places in rural Canada, but the nature descriptions are always so rarefied that I forget these stories are taking place during the course of ordinary history. When WWI begins, it's dismaying, like the earlier books have retroactively become this Eden that we're falling away from. And it's almost funny to say that, because this book is barely different from the others: we're still in Canada with all the women who can't go to war, and there are funny stories to tell, and breathless descriptions of nature in bloom, and every time something bad happens Montgomery pulls her punches and warns you well in advance. There's the obligatory love story, too, although this one is probably the least convincing of all the love stories so far (worse than Kilmeny, and that's saying something).

But while reading this, I finally identified what it is that makes me like some bits of Montgomery's books versus others. I whine endlessly about her nature descriptions (although guess who's spending a lot more time gazing dreamily at flowers these days?), but what I'm really reacting to is her tendency to summarize. Vast swaths of plot go by in this sort of middle-distance manner of recollection, when what I really enjoy is the close-up, moment-to-moment writing of her "action" scenes. I think this is why I enjoy her more when she's writing about children: children are active, and she tends to show their interactions in detailed sequences, rather than at a remove. When Montgomery's adults interact in a close-up scene, it's almost always for the purposes of gossipy conversation, often between characters I don't care about. Most of the moment-to-moment writing in Rilla of Ingleside is about the war, and while it's very interesting (from an academic perspective) to read a book that focuses almost exclusively on women's reactions to and analyses of the war, it makes for rather dry storytelling.

This probably explains the feeling of "remoteness" I get from her books -- they tell more than they show. I don't know if it's proper of me to fault her for that, since her style has tended that way from the beginning. But it explains why I miss Marilla and Mrs. Lynde and even Dora and Davy so much: the flavor of their personalities came through in close-up scenes in the earlier books, while few of the characters in later books (Anne and Gilbert included!) come across as strongly or vibrantly. Rainbow Valley was successful to me because it told a lot of little up-close stories about the Meredith children, but it was at the expense of the Anne and Gilbert's children, who were pretty much non-entities.

Next up chronologically is Emily of New Moon, which I've always adored, and I'm a little nervous that all this analysis is going to sour me on it. But we'll see. I write all these critical things about her books and wish they were different in various ways, but I still really enjoy reading them. I've been trying to read some other books I picked out on a whim from the library, and they're so tedious that it makes me yearn for a good sunset-description.

Holy moley. Dear Mad Men, please use your powers of attractiveness to seduce your premiere date even closer.

If I ever start a folk band, our name will be "The Consumptive Brunettes."

I'm working on a prologue-y bit for the book I'm writing (Hallways is the name of it) and I'm writing EXACTLY like L.M. Montgomery. Apparently reading eight books by the same author in one month does something to your brain. I haven't mentioned any flowers, forests, or sunsets, though, and I haven't compared any female characters to dryads or nymphs, and NO ONE has been described as "bewitching" or "slender." But I have been describing time travel energy as "blooms on a map," so the shame is still there.

My monitor wheezed its last breath a few days ago, so I've been relying on my laptop over the weekend. I love my laptop; it's an ancient ThinkPad that used to travel the globe as a company computer, and after it was decommissioned my uncle rescued it from recycling, swapped out a few components, and gave it to me for Christmas. Now I use it to avoid writing. The battery holds a charge for maybe thirty seconds, and sometimes the fan stops working, and I have to unscrew the panel on the back and give the spokes a little push before it'll power up. It's a scarred, sickly little thing, and I love it to death.

But yes, it is my partner in not-writing crime. In the last 48 hours I've written maybe a paragraph.

Anne of the Island, by L.M. Montgomery

So it turns out Anne initially rejects Gilbert's proposal because she doesn't recognize what love actually feels like. She meets the man she has always fantasized about -- rich, dark, handsome, poetical -- and when he proposes she's like "Oh wait, I think I've built a false construct of 'love' out of things I read in sentimental books. Real love is actually what I felt for Gilbert earlier. Whoops!"

Of course, because it's the early 1900s, she can't just go to Gilbert and be like "Hey, it turns out I love you, can we still get married?" She has to suffer and think she lost him, and he has to get tragically ill and almost die, and THEN they can get married. But that stuff only lasts for twenty pages, so it's fine.

The rest of the book is about Anne going to college to get a degree, and living with three other girls in a quaint house. A new character named Philippa is introduced, and while I initially thought I'd hate her, she turned out to be all right. I'm surprised by how much Marilla and Green Gables are side-lined in these later books; since I only read the first two as a kid, the Anne mythos to me was all about Green Gables and Marilla and Diana, and not these random college friends named "Stella" and "Priscilla" with interchangeable personalities.

Also, along with not being a fan of lower-class French or Italian people, Montgomery is not a fan of fat people, either. I think every book thus far has had a disparaging comment about fat people, in contrast to the slender (and bewitchingly gray-eyed!) Anne. In this last book, Anne meets a fat ugly woman who married a poor man who loved her, rather than a rich man who didn't. Anne is frankly stunned by the notion that fat ugly people might have romance in their lives, which, I don't know, betrays a certain stuntedness to her much-vaunted imagination.

Since I'm reading her books chronologically, I'm moving on to Anne's House of Dreams, even though Anne of Windy Poplars is technically the book that covers the next years of Anne's life. I figure I'll read Anne's story as Montgomery initially mapped it out, and then go back and see if she tried to retcon anything when she wrote books to fill in the gaps.