Review: The Horse Without a Head, by Paul Berna

Review: The Horse Without a Head, by Paul Berna

by Rich Horton

At an estate sale recently, whose deceased owner clearly had interesting taste, I saw a copy of The Horse Without a Head, for 50 cents (about what it cost in the first place) and it was just intriguing enough to buy. It was a Scholastic edition, so a children's book (really what we'd now call Young Adult though the primary characters are between about 10 and 13.) And the writer was French. And, as I quickly learned, the book became a Disney movie for television -- Disney's Wonderful World of Color series -- in 1963. The movie -- called The Horse Without a Head -- appears to be fairly well regarded, though it's not well known at all.

Paul Berna was the pseudonym used for his fiction by Jean-Marie-Edmond Sabran (1908-1994), a French journalist who wrote novels mostly for children. He did publish a few science fiction novels, the best known probably a diptych published in 1954 and 1955: Threshold of the Stars and Continent in the Sky. The Horse Without a Head was published in French in 1955 as Le Cheval Sans Tête, which actually does mean The Horse Without a Head. The English translation, by John Buchanan-Brown, was first titled One Hundred Million Francs in 1957, but my Scholastic edition, presumably in response to the movie, is called The Horse Without a Head. My copy is the first Scholastic edition, from 1964. It is illustrated by Jon Nielsen.

The title horse is a play horse, stretched over a sort of tricycle frame, the head of which has fallen off. A group of ten children from a grubby Paris suburb called Louvigny play with with -- riding dangerously down a steep street, heedless of traffic and pedestrians. It is shortly after the end of the Second World War, and there is evidence of the war around -- bomb craters and such. The kids are poor, but seem pretty happy, though it's clear their parents are struggling to get by. Most of the adults tolerate the kids, but the police sometimes harass them, and a couple of merchants object to the occasional upsetting of their products.

The most prominent kids are Gaby, the oldest, and the gang's leader; Fernand; and Marion, a girl of about 12 who is beloved by all the dogs in the town. Berna lightly sketches these kids in a believable way, and the portrayal of their lives and their parents is down to Earth and seems a quite honest look at working class life in postwar France. 

One day the horse crashes, and the frame is broken. Fernand's father has a friend who can fix it, and shortly after it is fixed, some suspicious characters begin to ask the children to sell it to them for a fairly exhorbitant price. But they aren't interested, and things turn more threatening. Eventually the horse is stolen. The kids complain to the police, who don't take them too seriously, and they also find another place to play -- an abandoned factory.

Meanwhile the police are complaining that they never get any action, or chance for promotion, even though there was recently a robbery of the train that runs through the town, in which 100,000,000 francs* were stolen. It seems clear that the suspicious folks hanging around are probably the criminals, and they must be looking for the the loot. Could the horse be involved somehow? And then Fernand realizes that in the junk recovered from the horse's hollow frame when it was recovered, there was a key. 

No need to detail the ending. It involves the key, of course, and some bumbling thieves, and the mildly bumbling police, and the kids' new hiding place, and Marion's dogs. It's really quite nicely done. As I said -- a believable portrayal of life in a Paris slum (for want of a nicer word), and a bunch of decent kids making their childhood special. The actual details of the crime and the way the children thwart it may not be wholly plausible, but that doesn't really matter. Worth the time.

*100,000,000 francs is stated to be worth about $200,000, which seemed awfully small to me -- but it turns out that that is about right for the exchange rate between francs and dollars around 1950.

Old Bestseller Review: The Feathered Serpent, by Edgar Wallace

Old Bestseller Review: The Feathered Serpent, by Edgar Wallace

by Rich Horton

Richard Horatio Edgar Wallace was born in 1875 in London. He was illegitimate, and grew up in poverty. He left school at age 12, joined the Army at 21, and acted as a war correspondent in the second Boer War. He turned to writing in 1905, beginning with stories based on his journalistic work (among other things, he investigated Belgian atrocities in the Congo.) His writing proved very successful, and he was very prolific, writing over 150 novels, and nearly a thousand short stories, as well as plays, poetry, non-fiction and screenplays. He moved to the US in 1931 to write screen plays for RKO, and he wrote the first draft of the screenplay for King Kong, but died rather suddenly in 1932. (Perhaps he could be called the "Leigh Brackett" of King Kong!)

He is not widely read now, and I had not read anything by him. But I found a copy of The Feathered Serpent at an estate sale, and figured I'd give it a try. The novel was serialized in the Weekly Telegraph in 1926 and 1927, and published by Hodder and Stoughton in 1927, with a US edition from Doubleday Doran. My copy is from Grossett and Dunlap in 1928. 

Many sources claim that the novel was later reprinted as Inspector Wade and the Feathered Serpent. This is not really true. There was a comic strip based (very loosely) on the stories of Wallace, some time after his death. They seem to have decided to unify the different stories by using the same name for the Inspector character in each story, so for The Feathered Serpent, the character Inspector Clarke (a somewhat minor character in the original book) became Inspector Wade. The comic strips seem to have been "renovelized" for republication as a Big Little Book. Three Inspector Wade books were published beginning in 1939. Inspector Wade and the Feathered Serpent came out in 1940. Based on snippets of that book I could find, the plot was radically changed from the original novel, and the book completely rewritten (in much worse style.) It seems to have been much shorter -- and after all Big Little Books were for children.

Back to the actual novel. It's fairly good fun -- no lasting masterpiece, but a nice readable novel with an interesting if implausible central mystery. The two central characters -- the "detectives" if you will -- are Peter Dewin, a reporter, and Daphne Olroyd, a young woman trying to make her way in London -- at first she is an assistant to the very wealthy Leicester Crewe, but when he decides to go overseas she gets a new job with another wealthy man, the scientist and philanthropist Geoffrey Beale. A side plot, of course, is the quickly developing relationship between Dewin and Olroyd.

The primary mystery concerns some threatening messages that some people receive featuring an illustration of a "Feathered Serpent" -- a Central American quasi-religious figure. The vulgar but popular actress Ella Creed gets one, Leicester Crewe, who seems to be perhaps her sugar daddy. And then there is a murder, of a man named Joe Farmer, who seemed to have some connection to both Creed and Crewe. There are rumors that a criminal named William Lane, thought to be dead, has been seen alive. Daphne Olroyd is briefly kidnapped at one point, while Peter Dewin keeps figuring out bits and pieces of the mystery without quite understanding it. And Geoffrey Beale's scientific knowledge -- he had been doing anthropological studies in Central America -- offers some hints. A past counterfeiting scheme, involving at least the mysterious William Lane as well as Joe Farmer, and a woman named Paula Staines, might have some bearing on things ...

The conclusion involves yet another murder, sort of an "impossible" crime, and a convoluted but reasonably interesting explanation for just what has been going on. All in all, as I said, by no means a great mystery, but not bad -- worth your time if you like classical mysteries with a soupçon of sensationalism. I don't think I'll actively seek out more of Edgar Wallace's work, but if another novel comes my way I might go ahead and read it.

Review: Ladies Whose Bright Eyes, by Ford Madox Ford

In 2022 I had a Curiosities feature in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction on Ford Madox Ford's time travel novel Ladies Whose Bright Eyes. Curiosities is a long running feature of the magazine highlighting relatively obscure science fiction and fantasy, and I've contributed several such features to F&SF. It's been a while since that issue appeared, and F&SF's website seems to have disappeared for now, so I thought I'd post about that novel here. My process for writing a Curiosities piece is to write an extensive review and cut, cut, cut -- Curiosities are limited to about 250 words. So I have reproduced the whole initial piece I wrote, with revisions based in part on improvements that resulted from the cutting process. 

Ladies Whose Bright Eyes, by Ford Madox Ford

A review by Rich Horton

Ford Madox Ford was born Joseph Leopold Ford Herman Madox Hueffer in Surrey, England, in 1873, the son of a German immigrant. His mother was the daughter of painter Ford Madox Brown, and Hueffer styled himself Ford Madox Hueffer for much of his life, and most of his earlier books were first published under that name. He legally changed his name to Ford Madox Ford in 1919 (partly in reaction to anti-German sentiment), and his later work, as well as reissues of the earlier work, was generally as by Ford Madox Ford, the name by which he is now remembered. (It is sometimes called a pseudonym, which is incorrect.) He died in 1939.

He is the author of one of my favorite novels, The Good Soldier (1915, first published as by Ford Madox Hueffer), a bleakly comic novel of a man with a “heart condition” (in more ways than one). It is widely featured on lists of the 100 best novels of the 20th Century, a laurel it surely deserves

Ford was particularly close friends (and a sometime collaborator) with Joseph Conrad (until they fell out), and was also close to the likes of Henry James, Stephen Crane, H. G. Wells, and Ezra Pound. He founded a key literary review of the Modernist period, the English Review. He fought in the First World War and suffered major injuries, from shellfire and poison gas. Later he was a founder of the Transatlantic Review, another major Modernist publication, supporting James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Jean Rhys, and Ernest Hemingway among others. Besides The Good Soldier he is best known for a quartet of novels about the War, collectively called Parade's End. His earlier Fifth Queen trilogy is also well-regarded. All in all, a major career, but scandal involving his fraught relationships with a series of wives and mistresses, and perhaps just the normal shifts in literary fashion, led to a temporary eclipse of his reputation, though it has been long since restored.

He was certainly by inclination a Modernist/realist writer, so Ladies Whose Bright Eyes stands out to some extent as having a science-fictional theme. It is the story of William Sorrell, a somewhat humbuggish publisher, who has an accident on a train while returning from a trip to the United States, where he got involved with a Mrs. Lee-Egerton. She gives him a gold cross that has been in her family for centuries as security for a loan in assistance of her rackety son … and then there is a crash.

Sorrell finds himself wandering across a plain, strangely dressed, clutching the gold cross. Before long he realizes he's in some sort of medieval situation, complete with hanged men on gibbets. He tries to convince himself that it's all a play of some sort, but eventually he arrives at a castle, and is taken in by a certain Lady Blanche, mistress of the castle while her husband is away fighting in Scotland. Sorrell soon realizes that his cross is regarded as an important relic, and it is battled over between the Lady Blanche, her rival Lady Dionissia, the betrothed wife of her husband's cousin Sir Egerton of Tamville, and the local order of nuns.

As Sorrell realizes he really does seem to be in the Middle Ages (about 1326, it seems), he hatches schemes to, Connecticut Yankee-like, use modern technology to make his way in the past. But he soon realizes that he really knows nothing valuable about how to make, say, an aeroplane. But he still finds some degree of success, mostly by accident, managing for example to subdue a group of bandits, and to improve the sanitation of the nuns' chickens. But the story turns rather more on the actions of the women, especially the combative, vain, and grasping Lady Blanche, and the rather more calm Lady Dionissia. We learn a lot about their positions and attitudes, and about everyday life in that time, and the politics of the day. All comes to a head when the two women, in the absence of their husbands, decide to joust for possession of the coveted gold cross.

This leads to a somewhat striking conclusion, as Sorrell seems to waver between two worlds, the present and the past. Is Lady Dionissia his nurse, and is he a delirious patient? Or are they both truly inhabiting the bodies of ancestors (perhaps)? Or is the time travel real? It hardly matters – Sorrell for certain is a radically changed (and improved) man; and he reaches the end valuing people and things much differently than he began.

The novel has an interesting publishing history. It first appeared in 1911, as by Ford Madox Hueffer. It was extensively revised and reissued in 1935, as by Ford Madox Ford. I've read both versions (the earlier one can be found at Project Gutenberg), and on the whole I prefer the revision. It gives us a bit more of Sorrell's personal history (and projects it a couple of decades in the future), shows us a bit more of the medieval ladies' positions, and has a better ending (including more interesting speculations and images of Sorrell's cross-time situation): Ford, revising following a terrible war and just preceding another, takes a darker view of the 20th Century, and Sorrell's hopes to be a better man, though real, are not celebrated so optimistically.

Review: Lies and Weddings, by Kevin Kwan

Review: Lies and Weddings, by Kevin Kwan

by Rich Horton

Kevin Kwan is likely best known for his first novel, Crazy Rich Asians (2013), which became a successful film in 2018. I haven't read that novel, but I did see and quite enjoy the movie, though I will say I thought another rom com featuring Chinese-American characters, Always Be My Maybe (2019), rather better. Kwan followed up his first novel with two more in the same milieu, and has published two unrelated novels since then: Sex and Vanity (2020) and the novel at hand, Lies and Weddings, from 2024. Besides the vaguely similar titles, these more recent books share another feature that I will not reveal until later.

Kevin Kwan was born in Singapore, to a family of Chinese descent. (I had a friend in college from Singapore, who was of Thai descent, and who was rather resentful of the Chinese Singaporeans, who apparently were dismissive of other ethnicities.) Kwan's family was pretty prominent, and so he surely had connections to the very wealthy people he writes about in his novels -- I don't know that his family was all that well off, though they seem to have been comfortable. His family moved to the US, to Texas, when he was 11. Aspects of his autobiography show up in Crazy Rich Asians, and also in Lies and Weddings, and I suspect in his other novels as well -- which is not to say that they are truly autobiographical novels.

(I mostly read this novel as an audiobook, and I'll note that I wasn't entirely happy with the narration, by Jing Lusi. The main issue is a matter of taste -- some of the voices the narrator adopted for the characters were downright annoying, and not the ones that were supposed to be annoying. (That is to say, the main antagonist, Lady Arabella, has an annoying voice that I thought worked very well.))

Lies and Weddings opens in the 1990s in Hong Kong, at a wild party. A young man, flush with money after a gambling trip to Macau, proposes to the beautiful Gabrielle Soong -- only to be confronted by one of his friends, Reggie Gao -- resulting in the accidental death of the first man in the ensuing scuffle. It's soon clear that Reggie was defending the honor of his sister, who had been the first man's girlfriend and who was pregnant by him.

Focus shifts a couple of decades into the future, to England. Eden Tong is a young doctor, of Chinese descent, living with her father in a small house on the estate of her father's friend Francis Gresham, the Earl of Greshamsbury. Eden is close friends with the Earl's three children, Rufus, Augusta, and Beatrice. But for some reason she has not been invited to Augusta's upcoming wedding in Hawaii. Eden doesn't much mind -- her medical schedule is demanding, and a trip to Hawaii would be expensive. But we soon realize that she hasn't been invited because the Countess of Greshamsbury, Lady Arabella, who is also of Chinese descent, doesn't quite approve of Eden, for snobbish reasons: in essence, she isn't good enough to be real friends with the children of an Earl.

But Augusta and Bea conspire to get Eden and her father, Dr. Thomas Tong, invited anyway. And we get to witness an absurdly extravagant wedding -- for the ambitious Lady Arabella, a former model and now a hotel entrepreneur, wants to outshine all her super wealthy friends, and has planned a fabulous party at a resort she owns on the Big Island. But amidst all the glorious meals and remarkable spectacles, Mother Nature has her way with things: a fissure opens up complete with lava and the wedding party is ruined, along with Arabella's resort. Beyond that, the time Eden has spent with Rufus on this trip makes it clear the two, friends since childhood, are truly in love -- and what's worse, Rufus's declaration of love is accidentally broadcast -- and Arabella hears it. Much worse still, the loss of her resort, which it turns out is uninsured, lays bare the fact that the Greshamsbury fortune has been entirely wasted. The Earl's indulgence of Arabella's dreams has caused him to take out numerous loans -- to the tune of hundreds of millions of pounds -- many of which are held by the rapacious Filipino billionaire Rene Tan.

The novel continues rather giddily on what seems almost a world tour. Eden, who has convinced herself that she has no future with Rufus anyway, is slandered by the furious Lady Arabella, and as a result loses her job and basically also her home. Lady Arabella plots to marry Rufus -- an aspiring artist -- off to a successful artist who is also, of course, an aristocrat. The financial issues of the Greshams, however, lead to the quick end of Augusta's marriage, and to, in Arabella's mind, the need for Rufus to marry someone fabulously rich, and it so happens that her aunt knows just the woman, a Hong Kong tycoon named Martha Dung. Eden, meanwhile, heads to Los Angeles at the behest of a pleasant but rather silly young Persian-American who is infatuated with her -- and there she encounters Rene Tan's profoundly dissolute son Luis Felipe. Eden's father, it turns out, is Rene Tan's personal physician -- he's been working heroically to keep Tan alive, but his efforts may soon fail. There are trips to Paris, Marrakech, Houston, Venice, and elsewhere, in every case accompanied by lush descriptions of fabulous meals, extravagant houses, expensive cars (and boats, and aircraft), and a great deal of appalling waste. And there are mysteries -- in particular about Thomas Tong's obligations to Rene Tan and about Eden's own history. 

All of this is resolved in satisfying (if somewhat predictable and perhaps a bit hasty) fashion. The novel is slickly written, fun to read. Kevin Kwan is overtly aware of the enormous privilege, and accompanying grotesque unfairness, that all of his characters enjoy. The book comes off a bit uneasy about this -- the descriptions of luxury are often quite alluring, and the way the approved characters (mostly Eden, Rufus, and Martha) portray their moral goodness frankly comes off almost perfunctory, and sometimes a bit oblivious, as when Eden refuses to wear the spectacularly expensive gown Bea gives her at Augusta's wedding and instead hurries to buy something off the rack which of course is amazingly perfect, and by a famous designer, and probably not exactly cheap, and fits her perfectly so she can throw it on just in time for the wedding. All the characters are extremely beautiful -- for example Eden, the hardworking comparatively poor NHS doctor, reveals that she had been approached to be a model, but refused because she knew Arabella would be mad if she outshone Augusta or Beatrice (or even Arabella herself), and Rufus is presented as having had more or less every woman in the world (including Eden and Martha) have a crush on him due to a shirtless photo taken when he was 16.

By which I mean, really, that this is a confection -- a work of popular fiction that is there mostly to entertain, and that does so quite nicely -- with a side serving of satire of the idle rich -- and by rich I don't just mean comfortable, I mean obscenely so. Kwan also deals with anti-Asian racism, as might be expected. But -- I've left out a key aspect of the novel, an aspect that was probably missed by a good many readers, but which is quite obvious -- and overtly signaled -- to a certain set of readers. For Lies and Weddings is a contemporary retelling of Anthony Trollope's novel Doctor Thorne. (And I understand that his previous novel, Sex and Vanity, is a retelling of E. M. Forster's A Room with a View.)

Contemporary retellings can sometimes be tedious, sometimes lame, sometimes tendentious. But sometimes they can work, and I think Lies and Weddings works. It's not that Kwan is as good a writer as Trollope, nor that Lies and Weddings is as good as Doctor Thorne. But Lies and Weddings is a fun read, and it's also fun for an admirer of Doctor Thorne to read. It's interesting to follow the ways in which Kwan uses the trellis provided by Doctor Thorne -- the ways he maps Trollope's characters to contemporary people, the tweaks he makes to the plot, even the structural changes he makes. 

The reader of Doctor Thorne will immediately unravel a key mystery in Lies and Weddings, though the funny thing is that this mystery really isn't a mystery at all in the original novel. (Kwan's restructuring of the novel's timeline is aimed at hiding this secret -- I do wonder, though, if non-Trollopean readers of Kwan's novel will still figure things out -- I suspect they may. (My wife might read the book and I'll ask her.)) Trollope's readers will also notice the similar names -- all the Greshams except Rufus have the same name they had in Doctor Thorne. There are other namedrops that aren't terribly important but work as gracenotes -- there's a Palliser mention, and a minor character named Courcy, and even a Doctor Fillgrave. 

Status in Doctor Thorne was more closely tied to family position than to money, though money certainly counted. (Money always counts in Trollope.) But no one in that novel is so absurdly rich as the people in Lies and Weddings (except perhaps the Duke of Omnium.) Money counts first by far in Kwan's novel, and ethnicity counts next -- in England, Asians face distinct obstacles, which goes a good way towards explaining Lady Arabella's awfulness. Dr. Thomas Thorne in Doctor Thorne comes from a minor family in what might be called the Squirearchy, and as such is "below" the Greshams and far below the de Courcys. So Dr. Thomas Tong in Lies and Marriages is disrespected not just because he's not as rich as the Greshams, but because he's Chinese in origin. The novel is pretty clear that while Thomas and Eden and Arabella all encounter racism, it has a somewhat minor effect on them, given that they are pretty well off. The novel does show one or two examples of poorer people (hotel maids, one aspiring artist) who are more directly impacted.

The specific plot turns are also fun to follow for a reader of Doctor Thorne. The stain of illegitimacy is less important in Kwan's novel, but he finds a way to make it make sense. There is a particular character in Doctor Thorne who is a favorite with many readers, and looking for that character-equivalent is also fun. (She's quite amusing in Lies and Marriage, though I'll confess not as satisfying for me as in Trollope's novel.) Lady Arabella in Trollope is awful in a different way to Lady Arabella in Kwan, but Kwan makes her machinations work in the present day. One way in which Kwan's novel may be superior is in the two main characters. Mary Thorne is a lovely and virtuous young woman, but Eden Tong is given more agency than Mary, and I really liked her -- lots of this is of course due to social change. Likewise Rufus is far more active and determined than the rather dithering Frank Gresham Jr. Kwan is not as engaging a writer as Trollope, and not a master like the Victorian was in control of the omniscient point of view, but he does some nice stuff, notably with sardonic footnotes, which seem like a clever way to do something similar to the way Trollope as narrator talks to his readers. (Even if the one footnote in which he sort of mansplains to us how Spam became popular in Hawaii and elsewhere in the Pacific due to World War II struck me as unnecessary.)

Bottom line -- Lies and Weddings is good fun, and it's not necessary to know its antecedent to enjoy it, but knowing Doctor Thorne may make it even better. I don't know how well Sex and Vanity does in echoing A Room with a View, but I am fine with Kevin Kwan using this strategy. 

Old Bestseller Review: The Love of Monsieur, by George Gibbs

Old Bestseller Review: The Love of Monsieur, by George Gibbs

by Rich Horton

My original focus on this blog was popular fiction of the first half of the 20th Century -- at best, obscure popular fiction that yet was successful in its time. I've definitely broadened my scope a good deal, but I still have an abiding interest in that sort of fiction -- rarely truly excellent but often interesting.

George Fort Gibbs (1870-1942) was an American novelist, screenwriter and illustrator. His father was a Naval surgeon, and a veteran of the Civil War. The father took suddenly ill in 1882, in Europe, and soon died. George's mother, despondent at her husband's death, committed suicide a year later (in the Anna Karenina manner.) George Gibbs was 13. He entered the Naval Academy, but soon left -- he doesn't seem to have been a good student. He turned to art, and also eventually to real estate, and had some success in both fields. He also began to write for magazines. In 1898 he moved to Philadelphia to work for Curtis Publishing, whose magazines included the Saturday Evening Post and the Ladies' Home Journal. Gibbs did cover and interior illustrations for the magazines, and published fiction. He married a Philadelphia Main Line woman in 1901, about the same time he started publishing novels. His novels were generally quite popular, and about a dozen of them became movies (all silents.) He and his wife had three children, all successful to one degree or another. Their eldest son, George F. Gibbs, Jr., was a playwright and amateur musician, but best known as a real estate developer. Their second son, Theodore Harrison Gibbs (called by his middle name) was a sculptor of some note, and he died in the Battle of the Bulge. His daughter, Sally Gibbs McClure, was a dancer, singer, songwriter, and a writer of poetry, novels, and a memoir.

The Love of Monsieur, from 1903, was Gibbs' second novel. I found a copy in an antique store, several years ago, and misplaced it in my garage, where my wife found it looking for something else the other day. I figured I might as well read it -- it's quite short (about 45,000 words) and it promised to be enjoyable romance/adventure fiction -- which turned out to be the case. My copy is possibly a first edition, published in May 1903 by Harper and Brothers. The copyright is shared by J. B. Lippincott -- so I assume the novel first appeared in Lippincott's Monthly Magazine. My edition has a frontispiece by Gibbs himself, signed with his mirrored GG. The book is dedicated to M. H. G. -- surely his wife, Maud Stovell Harrison Gibbs.

I've reproduced the cover of my edition (there is no dust jacket, and I don't know if there ever was one) as well as the frontispiece and title page. And I have to say, I do wish we could have novels these days presented as nicely.

There's really not too much to say about the novel. The Monsieur of the title is Monsieur Mornay, a Frenchman of low (illegitimate) birth who is close to King Charles II, and is as the novel opens spending his time in London, gaming and flirting and fighting. He encounters a noble Englishwoman, Barbara Clerke, a wealthy orphan, whom he saves from crashing her carriage. He is intrigued, but she is disgusted, not so much by his ignoble birth as by his dissipated ways. When he manages to gain the favor of a dance and conversation with her, she expresses her disdain.

But -- no surprise! -- she finds herself a bit puzzled that she is having second thoughts. And when her guardian provokes a duel with Monsieur Mornay, she is even angrier ... and then a revelation is made. It turns out that Monsieur Mornay is not in fact illegitimate -- his mother had actually married his father -- who was actually Barbara Clerke's uncle. And her guardian had papers proving that Mornay was actually the rightful heir to the properties he has been holding in trust for Barbara. But Mornay is now wanted for murder -- and is also out of favor with the French King -- so he must flee to America.

The rest of the novel concerns Mornay's time as a "pirato" -- or, officially, a privateer. He never plans to return to England or France, but Barbara Clerke, once she realizes that her claim for her riches is false, and all her wealth is owed to M. Mornay, decides she must renounce it, and attempt somehow to find him and convince him to claim his inheritance. She, of course still hates him as a libertine, but is willing to live in poverty instead of falsely claiming his rightful inheritance. 

The resolution is never in doubt, though the book does offer some piratical adventures, some implausible coincidences, a mutiny and a marooning. (But no worries about the marriage of first cousins!) What can I say? It's popular fiction of its era, and not badly executed. Nothing that really deserves revival -- but I was able to enjoy the book, which amuses and occasionally excites -- and does not outstay its welcome.

Two Classic Movies: My Man Godfrey and The River

Two Classic Movies: My Man Godfrey and The River

by Rich Horton

Here's an informal look at two movies I watched recently, both classics. These are My Man Godfrey, from 1936, and The River, from 1951. Both are very highly regarded films -- for example, both are featured on Roger Ebert's "Great Movies" list. 

My Man Godfrey is based on a 1935 novel by Eric Hatch, 1101 Park Avenue. The timeline from book publication to movie release was awfully quick in those days! In fact, the novel was quickly rereleased under the movie title. (Alas, copies of the novel run from $475 to $3000 on Abebooks! There was a 1950s paperback release but I couldn't find a copy of that online.) There was a color remake of the movie in 1957, starring David Niven and June Allyson.

The movie is directed by Gregory LaCava and stars William Powell and Carole Lombard -- and I'll always watch a William Powell movie. (I'm less familiar with Lombard, who died tragically early in a plane crash flying home from a War benefit event in 1942.) Both leads were nominated for Oscars, and they are both good, but I also really liked Gail Patrick, who played the nasty sister of Carole Lombard's character. (Patrick apparently became typecast as the mean rival to the top-billed women -- she said she was so afraid on the set that it came out as haughtiness or meanness. (Her sister in this movie is named Irene, mildly ironic in that she played a rival to another Irene (Dunne) in My Favorite Wife.) She also became a significant television producer (notably for Perry Mason) after retiring from acting.) 

My Man Godfrey is very explicitly a Depression film. We meet Powell's character, Godfrey Smith, while he's living in the city dump. Both Cornelia Bullock (Patrick) and her sister Irene (Lombard) try to hire him to help them win a Scavenger Hunt. He picks Irene, who is immediately intrigued by him, and who hires him as a butler for her family -- herself, Cornelia, her mother Angelica, and her father Alexander are each in their very different ways extremely hard to deal with so servants are leaving all the time. 

The plot is predictable -- it's obvious that Godfrey knows too much about how to act in a fashionable home to be of the social class they think, so he's actually wholly eligible (except for his age) for Irene, and she doesn't care anyway. (Though he does.) He puts up with the family's eccentricities, helps the much put upon maid/housekeeper, tries to help Alexander with his business (which is in serious jeopardy), and is fiercely opposed by Cornelia, who both wants to mess with her sister's life and (I believe) is also very attracted to Godfrey.

Godfrey quits once he realizes that Irene is getting too attached to him, at the same time as Mr. Bullock's business finally collapses. The resolution is economically a fairy tale, with Godfrey not only saving the Bullock family but lifting dozens of destitute men from poverty. But it's a screwball comedy, not a serious movie of social criticism, and the screwball and comedy aspects really work. It's a true ensemble -- all the lead characters are funny in very different ways. It's really a delight, one of the great comedies of the 1930s.

I saw one other classic movie recently -- The River, Jean Renoir's 1951 movie based on Rumer Godden's lovely novella of the same title, from 1946. I liked the movie a good deal -- it's visually beautiful and the characters are involving and convincing. 

It was something of a lesson for me in watching an adaptation, however. Having just read Godden's novel a couple of weeks ago, I was looking for a pretty straight adaptation. But there are really significant differences, which distracted me for a while. I finally had to accept the obvious -- both pieces need to be appreciated on their own.

Both the movie and novel are about a young woman, Harriet, on the cusp of adolescence. Harriet is the son of an English man who runs a jute factory on the shores of a very large river in what is now Bangladesh. (I'm pretty sure the river is the Padma -- which is called the Ganges in India. Bangladesh was part of India at the time of the action in both the novel and movie, though in 1948 it became East Pakistan.) In both book and film Harriet has sisters and a brother, and her mother is pregnant. She has a frenemy named Valerie, from another slightly richer English family. The action takes place over a few months, and key aspects are one shocking death, and Harriet's attraction to a wounded soldier, Captain John, complicated by a feeling of rivalry with two slightly older girls.

But the film does make significant changes. Harriet is the second child in the novel, and her older sister Bea is a rival (along with Valerie) for Captain John's attention. In the movie, Harriet is the eldest, and the "Bea" character is sort of replaced by Melanie, the biracial daughter of their neighbor Mr. John (another new character, presented as the much older cousin of Captain John, who had married a local woman, since deceased.) Melanie is a fascinating character, and to be honest I think the movie could have done a bit more with her. Along with this, the whole plot surrounding Captain John is a greater focus in the movie, and the romance of sorts that he has with all three girls (Harriet, Valerie, and Melanie) is more significant, and more serious. (Harriet is clearly too young for him -- and he acts appropriately in both book and movie -- and my sense was that both Valerie (in book and movie) and Bea (in book) were a bit on the young side -- 16 maybe? -- but Melanie in the movie is probably of age (maybe 20?) for a man in his mid 20s (I assume?) to be with.) Captain John is also an American in the movie -- I'm honestly not sure why -- while he seemed likely to be English in the book. And the movie seems to be set during World War II, while the time frame of the novella is more ambiguous -- possibly purposely so, though I myself lean towards WWI.

Having said all that, both the book and movie really work. They are lovely and honest portrays of a near-adolescent girl coming of age. India is (to my ignorant eyes) honestly portrayed. The lovely prose of the book is parallelled in a sense by the beautiful color portrayal of the setting of the movie. (The color palette is remarkable, very bright, very striking.) It's not a plot-centric story, in either version, but that's OK with me. Both are recommended -- though, perhaps not surprisingly, I prefer the novella. (I review it here.)

(I should note that Rumer Godden collaborated on the movie's screenplay with Renoir, so it should be assumed she approved of the changes to her story. And apparently she did like this movie -- she famously hated the adaptation of her novel Black Narcissus, though that movie too is considered a classic.)

Resurrected Review: The Dramaturges of Yan, by John Brunner

Here's another review of John Brunner, who is really one of my favorite SF writers of his era, but oddly more due to his less well-known works. These books, typically fairly short, clearly written somewhat quickly, are not nearly as serious or powerful as his most famous novels, but they are, well, more fun. At least the ones that work! -- he wrote some really weak stuff too.

This is a short review I did for my SFF Net newsgroup back in 2001. It's about a late Brunner novel, from 1972 (though it was serialized in Fantastic in 1971 -- I'm not sure if the book version is longer or not. The magazine cover, by Vaughn Bodé and Larry Todd, is much better than Chris Foss's book cover though!) I haven't made any changes to what I wrote then.

The Dramaturges of Yan, by John Brunner

a review by Rich Horton

Just this past week [back in April of 2001], I read a short John Brunner book I've had sitting around, The Dramaturges of Yan, from 1972.  Ace bills it, rather sillily, as a "worthy successor to Stand on Zanzibar".  Stand on Zanzibar does have worthy successors, but they are The Sheep Look Up, The Jagged Orbit, and The Shockwave Rider.  This book seems a bit tossed-off, maybe for relaxation.  Still, it's not too bad -- much better, for instance, than the other short Brunner book I read a few months ago: The Infinitive of Go, which I thought quite poor.

The Dramaturges of Yan is a very Jack Vance-like book.  It's set on the planet Yan, inhabited by the Yanfolk, who once had a high civilization, which crashed when some disaster, of their own doing, caused their moon to explode and become a ring.  The ensuing (somewhat implausible) rain of meteors made much of the planet uninhabitable. Some 10,000 years later, a small contingent of Earthfolk live in a city on Yan.  Earthmen have a significant interstellar society, built around a matter transmission device called the go-board.  The Yanfolk are the most intelligent aliens they have encountered.  More significantly, they are humanoid and sexually compatible with humans -- it is said that almost every human has tried sex with a Yanfolk, and two long-term relationships are ongoing, particularly that of the poet Marc Simon, translator into humanish of the Yan Mutine epics, and Shyalee.

The story revolves around the arrival of the artist Gregory Chart, whose art consists of, somehow, hypnotizing a whole society into acting out his visions for a few months, perhaps leading to a permanent change.  The conflict is between the humans who desire to welcome Chart, believing that this will enhance the position of Yan in the human galaxy, and those who fear the changes that will result.  It turns out, though, that the major players are the Yan, who have their own purposes with Chart -- they hope to rediscover the ancient powers of their "dramaturges" via Chart's efforts.

It all works out a bit unexpectedly, rather refreshingly so.  This isn't really all that good a book, but it's a nice entertainment, and rather original in some ways, despite the overt debt to Vance.