you brought it on yourself miss twiddle

So. This past weekend I obsessed about a couple of small points of grammar, but today I cornered Professor D. and geeked out at her about obscure syntax issues and Rules and text-editing, and now I think I have some of it out of my system. The other half won't be gone until after my presentation on Wednesday, though. The other thing that dominated my life this weekend also converged into a Thing, because I read Death Comes to Pemberley, a couple of the Victorian-Steampunk short stories in the Kelley Link and Gavin J. Grant Steampunk! anthology, and watched the finale of Downton Abbey. The result may have been that when I dragged myself away from JSTOR around 12:30 and fitfully fell asleep, I had dreams about the Dowager Countess and the pluperfect subjunctive.

I shall cut as soon as there are spoilers -- no worries. But first I would like to draw your attention to this article from the NY Review of Books (spoiler alert), which is, naturally, doing it's "critical takedown of overrated pseudo-intellectual television programming" thing. I think it's incredibly entertaining that so serious a publication as the NYRB has an essay whose first third is basically a shipping manifesto/plea for Lord Grantham/Bates* I always like to say that I learned how to do close reading by discovering the Harry Potter fandom in high school (back when…only 4 books had come out) and that fandom is basically an exercise in criticism of a sort; here the lines are definitely getting blurred!

I will say one thing about P.D. James's P&P sequel-cum-murder mystery: it was successful as a mystery: combining interesting period procedural details with red herrings and a not-too-obvious denoument. But I was expecting more Lizzie and Darcy tease each other and solve mysteries, and in that, I was disappointed…in this respect it is very like Downton: a noble, proud, and distant gentry obsessively caring for their dignity and their estates. Elizabeth and Darcy barely had any page-time together (she being busy bring jellies to the tenants and dealing with the housekeeper, while he was off doing the sorts of things that a magistrate of the county has to do when his estranged brother-in-law is found over a dead body on his estate.) I mean, Jane Austen characters are always more than paragons of social virtue! The best character by far was the eccentric and crochety fellow-magistrate Sir Selwyn Hardcastle, who got all the best one-liners and occasionally even provoked Darcy into being a little bit sardonic (obviously, Elizabeth was given no opportunity to indulge in such things.) [Also: aren't the Selwyns an old Harry Potter family? I'm just saying that Sir Selwyin's being a wizard would explain a lot.] I would say that it was a bit of a dystopian, Haha, You Thought It Would Be Happily Ever After Did You?, ironic sequel, but it wasn't. James obviously felt a great deal of affection and respect for Austen's characters. Too much respect. ( Spoilers for Downton Abbey S2 and Death Comes to Pemberley start here )

Also: these paper dolls are pretty amazing.

I. The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation (M.T. Anderson). I had been meaning to read this ever since it came out, but I could never bring myself to pick it up. It always felt like a book I *should* like -- historical fiction, literary narrator, twisty views on the heroical revolution -- and so I kept on putting it off. Then I found a completely new copy for 10¢ at the library sale table (my mother made me put in a dollar). I read it on the plane: one quarter of the novel for every couple pages of Cicero. And, Reader, this is a fantastic novel. Octavian grows up in a strange but retrospectively fortunate household, where a host of neo-classical scholars and Enlightenment intellectuals known only by numbers tutor him and flirt with his mother, an African princess in exile, as he is told. Gradually, the outside world begins to intrude, and Octavian realizes that what is really going on is rather different and rather more horrible than what he has been allowed to know.

First of all, most of the book is O.'s narration, and it is beautiful to read. It's a brilliant character to have created: O. has a complete classical education, and has a huge breadth of literary, historical, and 'scientific' background with which to describe his increasingly (or maybe just increasingly understood to be) horrific experiences as his fortune changes from protegé to experiment, to slave, to captive and fugitive, and in the context of which to think about the inhumanity and insidiousness of slavery, and the evil behind the motto "revolution to protect our property." There i definitely an anti-capitalist strain -- the chief villain repudiates the liberal arts and insists that the only good is profit and hence utility, as well -- and a strain of "oh, yeah, so you thought the American Revolution was all about freedom and justice and the rights of man, did you?" I wasn't bothered by either, actually, as both mostly agree with my own feelings.

II. The Winter Prince (Elizabeth Wein). Another book that I finally read, one that I have been seeing for much longer on the library shelf. I don't like stories about Mordred, and Mists of Avalon pretty much ruined any Arthurian telling with Celtic names (exception: Mary Stewart's). So I was not ever about to pick up this YA novel, where "Medraut" is embittered over his father "Artos'" preference for his legitimate son "Lleu." (Lleu? Double ll's alone pretty much rule out the book!) But now the series is four books one, seems to involve a North African kingdom as well/instead, and is recommended by Meghan Whalen Turner. So I steeled myself, and read the first one.

And I liked it. It didn't thrill me, or jump to the top of any list, but it was compelling, one of the most interior fantasies that I've read. It also reminded me of Mary Stewart, in that it was mostly grounded in post-Roman Britain, with ruined villas and old mines, and kingdoms where the whole royal family has to get out in the fields at harvest time, and goes hungry if it's a bad year. The set up is more or less as outlined above, but is make particularly creepy by the fact that Medraut narrates it to Morgause (= the sister who slept with Arthur and the sister who is plotting against him, in this version). It's after the fact, before we know what the fact are, as if Medraut is explaining his actions, possibly trying to justify them, to someone he hates and fears, and maybe loves. Her relationship with her son, it is clear from the beginning, has always been strong and unpleasant, but the details only come out bit by bit. Not everything worked for me: the character of Lleu didn't quite solidify for me, and it was his developing relationship with Medraut that turned out to be the most important.

III. One or another of the "Gordianus the Finder" mysteries (Steven Saylor). This was my third foray into Mystery Series Set in Ancient Rome. The first was the one set in the late Republic, called SPQR, or something, about a young senatorial type, I think. I only read one book -- the one that borrowed its plot from Book I of Bello Gallico. The second was Lindsey Davis' Falco series -- 1st century A.D., plebian lowlife with an aristocratic girlfriend, v. funny. I read a bunch of those. Anyway, so this one is also late Republic, commoner -- I'm not sure what the angle is after only one book. It was okay. Gordianus was moderately fun as a protagonist, but I think I may stick to Sir Peter Whimsey.

So, on penmage's recommendation (and because she provided a free link to it here, I'm reading Jo Walton's Farthing. It is made of all good elements: British country house party murder mystery (just like Agatha Christie), alternate history (Britain made peace with Hitler), moderately interesting characters. I'm enjoying it lots. But one thing is sticking out: a conspicuous absence, if you will. Actually, it isn't that conspicuously absent, just a bit around the edges. There's a bit of Shakespeare and Biblical quotation happening by the characters, which is good, but there's just about no classical quoting, and I'm missing it. The MC has a cute little system for talking obliquely about sexual orientation in terms of antiquity, and given that everyone is British upper class public school cum Oxbridge educated, I find myself expecting Virgil or Horace of Cicero, or SOMEONE.

It's interesting, because one of the things I love about Anthony Trollope (the only other thing I've read of Walton's is Tooth and Claw which is a rewrite of Trollope with dragons as the main characters, that possibly fails on just this count, now that I think about it) is the amount of allusion he makes just as a narrator. And I actually don't remember whether this (by which I now mean Farthing again) sort of novel does that; I want to say that Dorothy Sayers and Josephine Tey do have characters making learned references, but I'm not sure. And certainly, I may be being extra sensitive to this right now because I am only putting up with Horace on the grounds that he is of Extreme Cultural Importance. And so I want the vindication by finding him. Would a dulce et decorum est, even if it comes courtesy of Wilfred Owen, be too much to ask? Well, I still have quite a few chapters to go.

ETA: Does a reference to President Lindberg mean that this is the same alt-universe as The Plot Against American (which I haven't read)?

ETA2: Finished. I MUST HAVE THE SEQUEL. NOW. Poor Carmichael.