Quiz: Victorian Fiction

Over the past years I've posted some quizzes I've written for an online trivial league I play in. These quizzes have a format of 12 questions each, but naturally I typically write at least 15 questions before figuring out which work best. This year I outdid myself, and wrote 18 questions (with the help of Michael Moorcock, who made a few suggestions, one of which is in the list below.)

The theme was Victorian Fiction, originally intended to be concerning any fiction written during Queen Victoria's reign (1837-1901). After running the questions by a number of volunteer testers, I decided that it was best to restrict it to fiction written by actual subjects of Queen Victoria -- that is to day, anyone from the British Empire during her reign (in the end I included writers from England, Scotland, Ireland, and India -- abashedly, I realized I don't really know many writers from Canada or Australia or other British colonies from that period. (I read a Canadian SF novel from 1896 while writing the quiz, but that novel was so obscure I suspect I am one of maybe a dozen people alive who have read it, and in fact I alerted both the Science Fiction Encyclopedia and the ISFDB to its existence.))

I'll post the answers in a few days. Give your guesses in the comments if you feel like it.

So, here are the questions: 

1. By the 1890s, English morés seemed to shift away from the traditionally stuffy image of Victorians (exaggerated as that image may be). The writer who represented that shift most directly might be the Irishman Oscar Wilde, author of plays such as Lady Windermere's Fan, poems such as "The Ballad of Reading Gaol" and "The Sphinx", and what short novel, which might fancifully be read as allegorizing the decadence that could be seen as lying beneath the decorative exterior of the art of the "Naughty '90s"?

2. Charles Dickens' first several novels were published under a pseudonym and several of them, as well as some later works, were illustrated by Hablot Knight Browne, who chose the pseudonym "Phiz" to correspond with Dickens' pseudonym. Give Dickens' one-syllable pseudonym.

3. Elizabeth Gaskell is loved for her novels Cranford, Wives and Daughters, and a novel that was serialized in Charles Dickens' magazine Household Words right after Dickens' own Hard Times. Both Gaskell's and Dickens' books are considered "industrial novels", and both were set in Manchester (Gaskell's home, though Gaskell renamed the city Milton.) Name this book, which had a BBC adaptation in 2004, and the title of which refers to the protagonist's split time between London (and a nearby village), and her new home in Milton. 

4. Anthony Trollope, author of the Barsetshire and Palliser novels among many others, was famous for his prolificity. But despite the many novels (and often very long novels!) he wrote, he was also a very energetic worker in another area, part of the civil service of the United Kingdom. For which part of the civil service did Trollope work?

5. George Eliot was a bête noire for many high school students in my time who were forced to read Silas Marner, though these days she is (deservedly) a golden girl for her novel Middlemarch. (I say Middlemarch is transcendent, and Silas Marner is a fine short novel.) Those novels, and much of the rest of her work, were set in the 18th and 19th centuries in provincial England. But Eliot went far afield -- to Italy in the 15th Century -- for which novel published in 1863? (This novel's title is also the first name of an actress who appeared in an adaptation of Eliot's novel Daniel Deronda as well as several other period pieces.)

6. Three English sisters published novels in the 1840s that are still regarded as classics today. Their first books were published under a common surname, Bell. Their brother Branwell published some poetry but no novels. Name any one of the three pseudonymous first names the sisters used, each of which had a first letter matching the author's real first name.

7. Stanley Kubrick's 1974 film Barry Lyndon is adapted from a novel by William Makepeace Thackeray, who also wrote Henry Esmond (my personal favorite), The Romance of the Rose, and, most famously, a novel which takes its title from John Bunyan's decidedly non-Victorian allegory The Pilgrim's Progress. Give the title of that novel.

8. The now common practice of titling novels with quotes from poems doesn't appear to have begun until the Victorian Era (though there may be earlier examples.) Dickens' The Cricket on the Hearth (1845) takes its title from Milton's "Il Penseroso", and Rhoda Broughton's Red as the Rose is She, from 1870, uses a quote from Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner". Just four years later, Thomas Hardy had his first major success with which novel titled after a line from Thomas Grey's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard"?

9. "The Jewel in the Crown" of the British Empire was India. Needless to say, the record of the British Empire in India is highly checkered. There was a writer who was technically a subject of Queen Victoria, born in Calcutta (now Kolkata), educated in India and England, who wrote major plays such as Risarjan (or Sacrifice), from 1890, poems such as the collection Gitanjali, novels including 1901's Nastanirh (later filmed as Charulata by Satyajit Ray), and numerous short stories such as "Atottju" ("The Runaway"). In 1913 he became the first non-European to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Who was this polymath?

10. Some of the Victorian novelists were also poets, though only a couple achieved significant reputations. But one major poet produced an epic poem, Aurora Leigh, that the author called a "novel in verse", and which was called by the influential critic John Ruskin "the greatest long poem of the nineteenth century". Please give the first and last name of this poet, who was married to another major Victorian poet.

11. I loved Robert Louis Stevenson's novels as a child, such as Kidnapped, Treasure Island, The Black Arrow and Catriona, and he continues to enjoy such books as The New Arabian Nights as an adult. Stevenson traveled widely in his brief life -- he lived at times in his birthplace of Scotland, in England, in France, and in the United States (home of his wife Fanny.) He spent his last few years in what South Seas island group?

12. One of the best and most prolific Victorian woman authors was Margaret Oliphant, who wrote over 90 novels between 1849 and her death in 1887. Perhaps her best work (at least in your smith's eyes) is which 1883 novel in which the title woman crosses horns with her older cousin, as both eventually forsake marriage and instead work to maintain the family's bank in place of their feckless male connections? The title character shares a name with the tragic main character of a colorfully titled major American novel published during Victoria's reign. (First name only.)

Here are two questions that didn't make the final cut, the first because the writer was not a subject of Queen Victoria, and the second because the testers thought the question very hard, and I couldn't figure out how to supply any particularly good hints.

13. Leo Tolstoy published the bulk of his work during Victoria's reign, though he was of course not one of her subjects. But he did, for example, admire both Dickens and Trollope, and indeed Anna Karenina is shown reading a novel that seems clearly to be by Trollope on the fateful train journey at which she meets Vronsky (that cad!) and also witnesses what tragic foreshadowing incident? 

14. "Sensation novels" were very popular in England in the second half of the 19th century, showing scandalous doings behind the facades of seemingly ordinary families. Wilkie Collins was one of the first such novelists, and Rhoda Broughton a later example, but what woman, an actress in her teens, made a fortune in that genre, most notably with Lady Audley's Secret.

And here are the other questions I cut:

15. Herman Melville is undoubtedly best known for Moby-Dick, but I love the last novel he published in his lifetime, which sold so poorly it ended not just his career but bankrupted his publisher. I'm sure you can tell me its title. 

16. One of the most popular French novelists of the Victorian era was Alexandre Dumas, author of such enduring classics as The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers. And Dumas' son, also named Alexandre, was also a successful writer. He is best known today for a novel that was the source material for a great opera by Verdi. Give either the title of the novel (in French or English), or of Verdi's opera that was based on it.

17. Queen Victoria died in 1901, and there are of course writers whose career encompassed both her reign and those of her successors. One of the greatest published his most famous novel in the year of Victoria's death. This writer's stories published in Victoria's reign were often set in India, where he lived in early adulthood, though an important book of stories for children seems to be set in Africa. Just who was this man?

And this was Michael Moorcock's suggestion:

18. This author of The Ordeal of Richard Feverel and The Egoist was also a well-respected poet, who wrote the lyric that inspired one of Ralph Vaughan Williams' most popular orchestral pieces, The Lark Ascending.

Review: The Forever War, by Joe Haldeman

Review: The Forever War, by Joe Haldeman

by Rich Horton

This review will be full of spoilers -- it's a classic SF novel, and pretty much everyone in the field (except John Scalzi :) ) has read it. Short answer: it's definitely worth reading -- a bitter and cynical look at war, some cool ideas including the effect of time dilation and lots of physics, a somewhat transcendent but pretty creepy conclusion. And, also, some very '70s things, including pretty questionable -- at times downright offensive -- "sexual revolution" era sexual politics, and oddly 70s-ish notions of dystopia.

To my impressions:

I read The Forever War back in 1975 when it came out, mostly in the Analog quasi-serialization, though I bought the paperback too. I had to get the first two parts of the novel out of the library as I didn't start buying Analog until the August 1974 issue. The last two sections (in Analog) were in the fourth and sixth issues I bought. I liked it then and I endorsed its Hugo and Nebula wins. But if I am telling the truth, my memories from 50 years ago have become pretty dim, so I only recall the basic outline: William Mandella is drafted into a war against the aliens, there are several very impressive battle scenes, he falls in love with fellow soldier Marygay Potter, they are separated by time dilation, the war ends when it is realized the whole thing was a mistake due to poor communication, Marygay waits for William by flying back and forth in a spaceship until time dilation means their timelines are synchronized again.

We scheduled it for our book club this month, so I finally reread it. I got a Kindle edition, partly because I had heard that a significant chunk of the novel had been rejected by Ben Bova at Analog, and had only been added back to the book edition much later. The funny thing is, that chunk, was published as a separate novella in the November 1975 Amazing. And I don't remember it at all! -- even though I was buying Amazing at the time. I don't even remember the other stories in that issue, nor do I recognize the cover. Either my memory is completely shot -- possible! -- or I somehow missed that issue -- I don't think I had subscribed yet.

What did I think on a reread? It's still a pretty effective book. The telling is cynical in a totally believable way. The Army scenes ring very true -- and Haldeman would certainly be a better authority than me anyway. The soldiers are foulmouthed, dislike their commanding officers, but fairly disciplined if only because the alternative is dying. From my perspective a couple of things bothered me. One: in the Army "confraternity" -- sexual relastions with your fellow soldiers of the opposite sex -- is essentially mandatory, and (at least for a while) on a rotation basis. This seesm that it would be particularly hard on the women -- and there are hints of this in the novel. But only hints -- for the most part people seem happy to be always ready for sex and to be bedding a different person each night. In reality -- probably not much fun for most women, and, really, not so much fun for lots of men. Two: the casualty numbers are incredible, probably significantly higher than Russian casualties in Ukraine (and partly for a similar reason -- the politicians on Earth don't care.) Even worse, part of this is to my mind very avoidable casualties during trainging. Three: I don't quite buy the concept of only recruiting geniuses (150+ IQ) for the Army. I get that there's some satirical point to that, but still.

That said, it's very exciting, and well-written. The battle setups are interesting, and seem like a plausible use of the technology Haldeman invents. Some of this tech is pretty implausible, but in an almost believable fashion. The new section, originally called "You Can Never Go Back", concerns William and Marygay's return to Earth after their battles, at which time they are eligible to muster out. They describe at thoroughly decayed Earth society, in a very '70s fashion. Homosexuality is encourage as a population control measure (though -- as Mandella even points out -- birth control is pretty easy to enforce anyway.) Haldeman's depiction of homosexuality is mostly positive, I suppose, but there are some cliches, which I understand he regretted in later years. The rest of the depiction of Earth at that time seems a bit over the top -- but partly it's a device to make it plausible that the two of them reup.

The social changes from then on remain interesting. Homosexuality is eventually mandatory, and enforced by medical treatments. All births are by artificial insemination and by using artificial wombs. There are algorithms to ensure genetic compatibility for "better" children. The novel takes a somewhat neutral stance towards this, though I find it horrifying. And the final fate of mankind -- where every one is clones of a single individual, linked a sort of hivemind, is appalling, and really dangerous. There is a backup plan -- a few planets where heterosexual relationships and natural birth is allowed -- which of course is where William and Marygay end up. But seriously -- what is "good", what is valuable, what sort of art would be possible, etc. etc., in a world with only one actual individual. It's really truly terrible. 

Anyway, it remains a good novel. As with so many books, it doesn't hold up as well 50 years later -- I wasn't as impressed as I remember being back then. Nonetheless, it definitely heralded an outstanding careers, and beginning some time in the 1990s I got in the habit of reading every Joe Haldeman novel as they came out, every 2 years or so, and they are reliably strong work. (My favorites are The Hemingway Hoax, The Coming, and Old Twentieth.)

Review: The Elfland Prepositions, by Henry Wessells

Review: The Elfland Prepositions, by Henry Wessells

by Rich Horton

Henry Wessells is a bookseller, writer, and publisher. His imprint, Temporary Culture, has published a number of books in the SF/Fantasy genre as well as some critical works. He also runs a website and newsletter devoted to Avram Davidson. I first encountered his fiction with a remarkable story in the New York Review of Science Fiction back in 2003, "Ten Bears; or, A History of the Weterings: A Critical Fiction". Shortly thereafter he published a beautiful collection, Another Green World, which also displayed his bookbinding talents. (The allusion to one of my favorite Brian Eno albums also delighted me.) Since then I have met Henry in person a few times at the science fiction convention Readercon. 

His latest book is this collection of four more "critical fictions", a label which I take to mean works of fiction that openly acknowledge, and comment on, their debt to previous works. These stories, written between 2017 and 2024, depict the interactions of people from our world and Elfland from the point of view of the lower classes; and rather cynically. The main charactes are a cleaner, a barmaid, a dry-cleaner (and automobile manufacturer!) and a detective. The afterword directly cites Lord Dunsany's The King of Elfland's Daughter, Hope Mirrlees' Lud-in-the-Mist, and Sylvia Townsend Warner's Kingdoms of Elfin; and the stories themselves directly allude to many other writers (a helpful list of works cited is included.)

In "Cleaning Up Efland" the narrator wants to go to Elfland but not as a changeling or slave, and learns how to get jobs there as a house cleaner -- there's not much more to the story than that except of course for the language, and sly references, and the way we see something real about life (if that's what it is) in Elfland. In "The Barmaid from Elfland" the narrator recognizes the title character as an elf and falls for her -- which we know is dangerous! And things go, more or less, as the rules for these stories say they must -- and the story gets there beautifully. "John Z. Delorean, Dry Cleaner to the Queen of Elfland" gives the notorious automaker a backstory in which he makes an Elfland fortune by doing dry cleaning for the elves, which leads to some good fortune as he starts his business -- but of course bad fortune when the Queen turns against him. The last line here is a killer. And "A Detective in Efland" has a man hired to retrieve a young girl who has disappeared -- kidnapped by elves, the mother says. Of course there is more going on -- this is a hardboiled detective story after all -- and we learn a little more about the seamy underside of Elfland, especially the uses a certain school has for kidnapped humans.

These stories are elegantly done, very clever, beautifully dark in implication. The tricks of making Elfland effectively mysterious are ready to Wessells' hand, and so too the ways of showing both the glamour and the danger. It is nice but not necessary to pick out the allusions. Henry Wessells is not prolific at all (in fiction) but what he does is outstanding.

Review: The Tents of Wickedness, by Peter De Vries

Review: The Tents of Wickedness, by Peter De Vries

A review by Rich Horton

Peter De Vries is one of my favorite midcentury American writers, and one somewhat neglected these days. This is in part because he was a comic novelist, and his primary subject, suburban adultery, may have lost centrality as time passed. For all that though, he could be very funny indeed; and he could also be very serious, in the midst of comedy, as with my choice for his greatest novel, The Blood of the Lamb.

The Tents of Wickedness (1959), however, is not quite a success. It's a sequel to Comfort Me With Apples, from 1956. The main character, Charles (Chick) Swallow, was also the main character in Comfort Me With Apples, and in both novels he is tempted into adultery, though in very different ways. In the first novel, he had just taken a job as advice columnist for the local paper in Decencey, CT, the Picayune Blade; and through the course of the novel his advice had at times backfired, in particular in the case of his brother-in-law Nickie. He still has that job in the new novel, and Nickie is still a problem -- indeed, Chick's sister is ready to divorce him.

But the main engine of the plot is Beth ("Sweetie") Appleyard, a girl he had dated in high school but had never managed to get into bed. As The Tents of Wickedness opens, he and his wife are going to a neighborhood party -- and it turns out Sweetie is to be their babysitter. This is a bit of a problem for Chick, as he's convinced his wife will ferret out their shared past. But the big problem is Sweetie herself, who has gotten stuck in an extended adolescence. And her father seems to blame Chick -- for an incident in the coalbin when they were very young; and then, paradoxically, for not deflowering Sweetie when they were teens. 

So Chick ends up entangle in various schemes to get Sweetie to mature. This involves at first a number of parodies she has written of prominent poems, which Chick manages to get published. On the strength of this Sweetie moves to Greenwich village, but, disappointed that the boys she meets seem too serious, she returns to Decency, and tells Chick that she wants a child, but doesn't want to get married. Chick refuses to impregnate her until is seems she'll choose Nickie instead, and so to try to save his sister's marriage, he nobly sleeps with Sweetie.

The results of Chick's various maneuverings, along with Nickie gaining a second personality as a master thief, not surprisingly gets Chick in more and more trouble. Add in Sweetie's father getting involved with a British woman who might have her eyes on the family fortune; plus changes at the newspaper, and then an attempt to place Sweetie's child with an appropriate adoptive family, and ... well, lots of tangles.

The problem is, these tangles end up being a bit tiresome, and not terribly convincing. The characters are not as well realized as many of De Vries' characters -- particularly Sweetie, who never really comes to life. And the novel itself is a stylistic tour-de-force, that only works about half the time -- the chapters are written in the style of a series of well-known novelists. For me, alas, while I had no trouble figuring out when the novelist was Austen, or Hemingway, or Kafka; I was stymied by the likes of John P. Marquand. More importantly, though, the effort of mimicry -- well enough pulled off -- seemed to interfere with De Vries' comic timing, and the book just isn't as funny as his best work. 

Review: I Who Have Never Known Men, by Jacqueline Harpman

Review: I Who Have Never Known Men, by Jacqueline Harpman

by Rich Horton

Jacqueline Harpman (1929-2012) was a Belgian novelist, filmmaker, and psychoanalyst; a woman of many parts who was also fascinated by physics and astronomy. She was of Jewish heritage, and her family spent the war years in Casablanca to escape the Nazis. (Several relatives were killed in the Holocaust.) Her first husband was a film director and she collaborated on several of his films, and turned to writing and then to psychiatry. She published a couple of dozen books, with considerable success. I Who Have Never Known Men (1995) was the first of her books to be translated into English, in 1997 as Mistress of Silence; and several further novels have been translated since then. Mistress of Silence was reissued in 2022 as I Who Have Never Known Men, a more direct translation of the French title (Moi qui n'ai pas connu les hommes) and also a direct quote from the novel. It gained considerable popularity at the time. The translator is Ros Schwartz. I listened to the audiobook, read very well by Nikki Massoud.

The unnamed (even to herself) narrator opens by telling us that she is alone as she writes this account, and will likely die soon. And then she tells of her life. Her first memories are of life in an underground cage. She is the only child in a group of 40 women, who are kept prisoner by a group of men, guards. They never leave the cage, and the men never enter the cage. They are kept in order by whips, though by the time of the story, the women never seem to be hit -- the snap of the whip near them is enough. They are not allowed to touch each other, and they have no books, no paper, no clock. The single toilet is out in the open.

This goes on for years, until the narrator, called the "child" by the other women, is about 15. She is pubescent, and has what seem to be sexual fantasies, but is not wholly developed sexually. She has passed from a feeling of anger with the other women to some accommodation -- after years of refusing to tell her anything, they begin to tell her what they know of their situation, and what they remember of their past life -- very little in either case. The narrator learns simple math, learns to count time, and becomes friends with a 40ish woman named Anthea. 

Then, one day as food is passed into their cage, there is an alarm, and the guards suddenly flee, leaving the keys in the lock -- and so the women escape. They head upstairs and go outside, and find themselves on a large and almost featureless plain. There is lots of food stored in their prison, and some equipment. They set up a camp outside, and then, led by the narrator, begin exploring. In time they discover additional prisons, in which they inevitably find 40 dead people -- sometimes all women, sometimes all men. They make themselves homes. And, of course, the women begin to die, of old age, illness, and suicide. Meanwhile the narrator is ever learning, learning eventually to read and write, and after everyone else has died, making a couple more significant discoveries.

But still, never an understanding of what disaster led to their imprisonment (and that of so many more.) Nor do they even know where they are -- this planet can hardly be Earth. In this way this novel -- rightly acknowledged as a work of science fiction -- radically differs from most genre SF, for there is no explanation, no understanding. What is it about, then? It is most definitely NOT, unlike what some remarkably obtuse critics have suggested, anything at all like The Handmaid's Tale. And while in many ways it describes a terrible, and very sad, situation, it is oddly not bleak in tone. This is largely a function of the narrator's voice, and of her innocence, resulting in her knowing nothing of the Earth where she was born. But nor is it at all triumphalist. The narrator knows that her life in the end means nothing, solves nothing. She appears to -- to the extent possible -- live a good life, if a lonely life; but she certainly mourns what she missed. The story does have something to say about organizing a life, a small society, in a nearly hopeless situation. It does have something to say about life without men -- but remember that the men imprisoned here had a life without women. It's a strange and mysterious book -- more involving than I expected on first encountering it. I don't think it's as good as its reputation suggests -- perhaps I am so much a genre reader that I really do miss some explanation -- but it's worth reading. 

Review: Bewilderment, by Richard Powers

Review: Bewilderment, by Richard Powers

by Rich Horton

Richard Powers is a very successful literary novelist whose works always address scientific ideas, and often cross the ill-defined border into actual science fiction. He became a bestseller with his 2018 novel The Overstory, about trees and forests. He is roughly my age, and we were at the University of Illinois at the same time (though I didn't know him), so I've long kept track of his work, and I loved his early novel The Gold Bug Variations. He has won a MacArthur Fellowship, a Pulitzer Prize, and a National Book Award. 

His most recent novels have been intensely concerned with ecological systems and with ecological catastrophe. Bewilderment, from 2021, certainly fits that template. And it is definitely science fiction -- set in the present day more or less, but in a slightly alternate history.

Theo Byrne is an astrobiologist at the University of Wisconsin, with a nine year old son, Robin, who has some problems. Robin presents to this reader, at least, as somewhere on the autism spectrum (quite high-functioning.) He is prone to fits of rage, and he is very sensitive. Also, his mother Alyssa died in an accident a couple of years before the events of the novel -- a loss that has devastated both Theo and Robin. As the novel opens, the two are on vacation in the Smoky Mountains, near where Theo and Alyssa had honeymooned, and we see Robin's fascination with the stars (Theo's focus) and wildlife (Aly's focus.)

Back in Madison, we learn about Robin's troubles in school, and about Theo's impatience with the "medicate first, ask questions later" attitudes of school officials and doctors -- he doesn't think that treatment will help his son. The two are vegan -- learned from Aly, who was an animal rights activist. One of their shared pastimes is virtually visiting simulations of exoplanets, using a program Theo has developed with the intent of understanding how to detect signatures of life in the data from worlds circling other stars. One of Robby's obsessions is following in his mother's footsteps: doing everything he can to protect animals from the ecological devastation caused by humans. In pursuit of this he starts drawing animals from the Endangered Species List, and even stages a protest at the state capitol building.

Under pressure to enter Robin in a treatment regimen, especially after he broke a classmate's cheekbone in an understandable fit of rage, Theo takes up another Professor's offer of seeing if an experimental treatment will help. The technique is real -- Decoded Neurofeedback, or DecNef, and Professor Currier is hoping to use the treatment for emotional problems, indeed, to induce empathy in subjects. Theo and Aly had contributed some early brain state readings, but Theo has come to suspect that Aly and Currier had had an affair. Still, any hope for Robin is worth it, and Robin enters into the program, with good results that become astonishing when he trains himself using Aly's brain scans. Indeed, he begins to feel that his mother is somehow present in his mind.

But all this is set against an horrifying political backdrop. The President is viciously anti-Science, for essentially religious reasons. In many ways he resembles Trump -- though in his case his attempt to overturn an election result is successful. And his stance against science imperils not just the program Robin has been using; but Theo's life work, which depends on the Next Gen Space Telescope, and then on a follow on project which will allow very precise observations of exoplanets. Alongside all this, their are increasing climate-related catastrophes, and serious threats of plagues, and other more mundane issues.

I won't detail the way the book is resolved, though we are given hint after hint. (Most obviously, a book Robin and Theo read is Flowers for Algernon.) But it's a remarkable achievement. I did find myself arguing with it at times, and I do feel that Theo (and perhaps the author) failed to show empathy for some of the characters cast as villains, which I found ironic in a way. But the ultimate message comes through, and does so very powerfully, and the final scene is beautiful indeed. The various themes are wonderfully intertwined -- our empathy, for humans and other species is important. Understanding life on other planets is important. The various different forms of life Theo's simulations show is important. Alyssa's life, death, and lifework is a sort of running commentary. Beauty is everywhere, and so is ugliness and tragedy. And the scientific ideas are not only interesting in themselves but truly reinforce the novel's themes. Even the title is an intertwined them: "bewilderment" at the way people ignore science, "bewilderment" at the way Robin's mind works, and also a command, sort of, to "be wilder", or to engage in "bewilderment" as a sort of analog to "rewilding".

An outstanding book, and one of the best SF novels of the past several years, which, sadly, was not noticed with the field as much as it should have been.

Review: The English Air, by D. E. Stevenson

Review: The English Air, by D. E. Stevenson

by Rich Horton

(I reviewed a few novels already by Robert Louis Stevenson's cousin Dorothy: so, biographical details can be found here.)

D. E. Stevenson published two novels in 1940 -- The English Air, and Rochester's Wife. Both novels are set in the late '30s. Both novels feature families with men in the military. Rochester's Wife was the first Stevenson novel I read, and I thought it kind of a mess -- though it was just good enough in certain ways that I decided to keep trying her novels. (Also, I had enough friends eagerly promoting her work that I figured something was going on!) Since then I've read a few more of her novels, and the best of them are quite delightful, so I'm happy I kept up with it.

One of the things that bothered me about Rochester's Wife was how oblivious the characters seemed to the coming catastrophe. So it was interesting to get to the The English Air (which I believe was written right after she wrote Rochester's Wife, though it may have been published earlier in the year.) The English Air opens in 1938, when Franz Heiden, a young German man, whose father is a midlevel official in the Nazi regime, but whose late mother was English, comes to stay with his mother's first cousin, Sophie, at Chellford, a seaside town. This visit is on the surface a reason for Franz to (at long last) visit his mother's family (his father's controlling nature, and anger at the English role in WWI, had previously prevented this.) He also wants to improve his English, and his father wants him to report on English morale (not strictly spying, just observation.)

Sophie's daughter, Wynne, is a free-spirited and attractive girl just a few years younger than Franz, and so any reader of D. E. Stevenson knows where that's going right away. And there are really no surprises in that romance plot. But that's not really the heart of the novel. For one thing, it's an ensemble piece, and we see things via several characters. Sophie herself is an important character -- a fortyish woman with a reputation for a sort of silliness, but with a way with people so that everyone likes her, and a way with her silliness that's rather deep. Sophie's husband has died, and his half-brother Dane, who is independently wealthy, manages the house and Sophie's finances. Dane himself, Major Worthington, is an interesting and mysterious character -- he had a "good war" in the first War, but suffered some sort of injury, and so doesn't do any particular work, and spends a fair amount of time overseas, for his health. (Again, most readers will quickly cotton to what Dane really does with his time.) Wynne's brother Roy is in the Navy, and their local friends include members of the military as well. 

As time goes by, Franz learns colloquial English, and sends increasingly puzzled reports to his father. At first he finds the English lazy and unprepared, but slowly learns that there is steel behind this attitude. (It could be said that there is a bit of English bias behind some of Stevenson's depictions.) He realizes his feelings for Wynne, but knows it is impossible for them to have a relationship (plus his father would never consent.) His frustrated father begins to ask him to return to Germany, but he doesn't want to leave, and eventually Dane (who also is worried about his attraction to Wynne) gets him a job in London. The Munich Agreement comes in September, and Franz is overjoyed. No war! Peace in our time! Germany and England friends forever! But of course these hopes are dashed when Hitler takes Czechoslovakia -- and Franz's eyes are fully opened. He quickly converts to complete opposition to Hitler -- but he knows his place is back in Germany ...

All along the English characters realize that war will surely come. And Stevenson is really very good in portraying the months before the War, and the few months after it starts. (The book ends on February 29, 1940 -- exactly when Stevenson finished writing it, and a couple of months before Dunkirk.) Each of the characters is affected, of course. Franz (now called Frank by his English friends) is back home, but alienated from his father. Wynne and her friends set up a hospital. Roy and the others in the military are in active service of course. And Dane -- Dane has a pretty important role himself. I won't detail what happens, but there is adventure and sweetness and surprise -- and an ending that is meant to be hopeful but, as written, almost certainly means that (as with so many in the War!) the final fates of some of the characters will be sad. 

Oddly, the specific conclusion to the novel -- at least, Franz's plans -- became impossible within days of Stevenson finishing the book, and this edition (from the Furrowed Middlebrow imprint of Dean Street Books) reproduces some correspondence between Stevenson and her publishers, in which she wonders if she should alter the ending, and even if the book should be shelved until after the War. But the publishers felt that wasn't necessary, and settled for a brief explanatory note. (Apparently, Stevenson did provide a replacement conclusion, but it has been lost.)

This is quite a fine book -- much better than Rochester's Wife. The romances (there are two) are well enough done but kind of minor. Where the book shines is simply the portrayal of life in England (and a bit of life in Germany) in the runup to the War. And the characters are nicely done as well, particularly Sophie -- another wonderfully captured middle-aged woman -- Stevenson (a middle-aged woman herself at the time) was really good with those characters in many of her books.