Book Review: Antony and Cleopatra by William Shakespeare

Eponymous Challenge #2
Royalty Rules Challenge #3

The world as the Romans know it is divided between three men, but those three are about to be reduced to one. With Aemilius Lepidus out of the way, the fight is between Mark Antony and Octavius Caesar. Antony prefers to spend his time in luxury in Egypt with the still-beautiful Cleopatra, while Octavius concentrates on the running of the empire. They are united for a time by the threat posed by Pompey and by Antony’s marriage to Octavius’s sister. But the lure of Cleopatra is too strong, and the desertion of Octavia gives her brother the perfect excuse for war. Antony is confident of victory; but his pride goes before the fall not only of himself, but of Cleopatra.

It was hard not to read this and not compare it to what I know of Roman history. A reasonable amount of compression took place; Lepidus was dispensed with some years before the Battle of Actium. This realisation didn’t hamper my enjoyment of the play; after all, Shakespeare is hardly reliable history (Richard III, anyone?). Besides, the rearrangement of the empire took second place to the relationship between the two main characters. Antony was entranced by Cleopatra, happily ignoring official business where possible so that he might stay with her, while she was not content unless he was in Alexandria with her. For a famous monarch, Cleopatra had moments of surprising clinginess and emotional erraticness; for someone who controlled a kingdom, she didn’t always have much control over herself. Her powers of seduction being legendary, however, I didn’t stop to think overmuch about what he saw in her.

The structure of the play was impressive, but I couldn’t avoid the thought that it must be hard to stage. Several acts run to more than a dozen scenes, and some of those fill less than a page; just enough to establish the who, what, and where. (The mind boggles at the idea of the backstage chaos created by having groups of people entering and exiting in such quick succession.) The main characters leave plenty to think about, being so drawn as to allow for the reader’s own judgement. A hero, or a fool? A tragic queen, or an emotionally unstable manipulator hoist by her own petard? A political schemer, or a man genuinely concerned for the empire he’d inherited? The play doesn’t decide. Its downside is that, compared to other tragedies, it feels . . . well, rather un-tragic. It doens’t inspire the if-onlys as, say, Romeo and Juliet does; it prompts no listing of things which might have changed everything if they’d just turned out differently. Antony and Cleopatra carries a sense of leaden inevitability.

Rating: B

Now reading: The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas (EC)
                                The Big Over-Easy - Jasper Fforde (888C)

Book Review: A Doll's House and other plays by Henrik Ibsen

In A Doll’s House, perhaps the most famous - and at the time, most scandalous - of Ibsen’s plays - the doll is Nora Helmer. Indulged by her husband, who treats her as a decorative and none-to-bright ornament, she has concerns which he knows nothing about. When scandal threatens the family, the doll finally decides to think for - and of - herself. The League of Youth is a political comedy in which the charismatic Stensgard throws himself into local political manoeuvring, beginning with the founding of the League. But before the campaigning can get underway, the characters end up at increasingly tangled cross-purposes. And in The Lady from the Sea, a mystery form as the past comes back to haunt Ellida Wangel, who grew up on an island and cannot bear to be far from the ocean.

As it turned out, the plays appeared in the book in reverse order of preference. First was The League of Youth - more politics! I can’t think, offhand, of any author who’s managed to make politics interesting, and Ibsen was no exception. The more farcical aspects of the plot were amusing, but it’s telling that I had to check the book to remind myself of the main character’ s name. A Doll’s House won me over by the end with a fine appeal to my feminist instincts, but it took me a while to warm up to it. Yes, Torvald Helmer was a bit of a jerk who treated his wife like a child; but she let him do it and happily played along with his infantilisation of her. She also struck me as silly and spendthrift, and even though she found a backbone I still had doubts about her ability to survive on her own. My favourite was The Lady from the Sea. I like a bit of a mystery, although this one didn’t end the way I thought it would (I think I’ve read too many ghost stories).

Rating: B

Now reading: The Man Who Knew Too Much - G. K. Chesterton
                                Marley & Me - John Grogan
                                Rescuing Rose - Isabel Wolff

The Catch-Up Part I

I’ve seen it done on other blogs, but never thought I’d do it on mine. Multiple book reviews in one post, that is. It always seemed like cheating; but I’m six behind, and short on time thanks to a backlog of library and challenge reading, and all the work I’m starting to put into wading through the morass of confusion that is end-of-university job hunting, and the dilemma of whether to stay in Queensland or to move out for the first time into a state where I won’t know anyone.

But I digress. I am far enough in arrears, review-wise, to divide up the backlog into two sets of three. (I should point out, this was not my fault; I had a violent allergic reaction to something and spent over a week itching terribly and unable to do much of anything.) So I now present abbreviated reviews of:

The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
New Year’s Reading Resolutions #19

Sam Spade’s day takes a turn for the worse when his partner is murdered while tailing Floyd Thursby, the man who supposedly ran off with the sister of their client, Miss Wonderly. Shortly afterward, Thursby is also killed, and certain members of San Francisco’s finest think that perhaps Spade shot one or the other - or both. Naturally Spade has no intention of being charged with anything, and fends off the police while burrowing through a mass of lies, false identities, double-crossing and greed. The whole affair centres around the object of that greed: the Maltese Falcon, a masterpiece of gold and jewels disguised as a piece in black enamel. A lot of people want it, and none of them much care how they go about getting it. One thing, though, is certain: someone will be going down for those murders. And it’s not going to be Spade.

In a word: fantastic. It lives up to its reputation as the great crime novel. The writing is somewhat sparse, focussed on concrete details, but works beautifully and manages to convey a strong sense of character. Sam Spade is very cool, strolling through the plot unfazed by much of anything - except his partner’s tearful widow. The three other main characters are also memorable. Gutman seems like a stereotypical jolly fat man but is consumed by an obsessive avarice. Joel Cairo is an opportunist who doesn’t let his lack of experience in such dealings deter him, no matter how many times he winds up at the wrong end of his own gun. And Brigid O’Shaughnessy is a femme fatale as likely to seduce a man as hit him over the head. The plot progresses at a steady pace and takes not one but several turns before the end. Anyone who likes a good whodunnit should read this.

Rating: A+

Three Comedies by Ben Jonson

Jonson’s three greatest comedies in one volume, all featuring the common thread of scammers and con artists on the hunt for dupes. The title character in Volpone is a rich man without family, who amuses imself by feigning illness and dangling the prospect of inheritance before several people. In The Alchemist, a servant takes over the house in his master’s absence, setting up with a couple of accomplices as magicians and parting the gullible from their cash. And Bartholomew Fair follows a group of members of and visitors to the Fair, al of them blissfully unaware of the disguised Justice in their midst.

I enjoyed Volpone, although it was difficult at times to keep track of who was who and who was up to what. The Alchemist was highly confusing, filled with the jargon of the titular profession. It would have been impossible to fully annotate - the notes would have been nearly as long as the play - and I could understand the editor’s reasoning that since the patter of the charlatans was meant to be obfuscatory, a bit of puzzlement doesn’t matter. But I don’t like being unable to make sense of things, and it’s hard to read something when you can’t make head or tail of it. At least partly because of this, it was hard to follow the characters and goings-on of the play. Bartholomew Fair was nearly as bad, because of the enormous cast. I was amused, though, to see that four hundred years ago, ‘jordan’ was a slang term for ‘chamberpot’. My mind couldn’t help thinking of Jordan the overinflated page 3 girl. How ironic that it should now be an accepted name - and one used by someone regarded as attractive, at that.

Rating: C- (But I will say that I think a different edition might have been easier to read, and I’m sure they’re much easier to follow on stage).

Down Under by Bill Bryson

Having long been fascinated by Australia, Bryson finally decided to have a good look around the place. He sequence of visits involved a transcontinental rail journey on the Indian Pacific with a stopover in the arid west of New South Wales; a drive between the major cities of the south-east; a visit to tropical Queensland that didn’t quite go to plan; a road trip from Darwin to Alice Springs; and more motoring along the West Australian coast. He covered only a tiny portion of the country, but quite a variety of its contents. The whole account is filled with humour, disasters, interesting facts, and an unshakeable awareness of just how many ways there are here in which to die an agonising death.

I loved this; it was a wonderful opportunity to find out how Australia looks to an outsider. Sadly my hometown didn’t create a good first impression (so bad, in fact, that he amused himself in the hotel bar inventing slogans like ‘Canberra - Why Wait for Death?’). And I do have to admit that if you’re looking for nightlife, Canberra’s not a good place to start. But he did see the light: “I had been scorning it for what was in fact its most remarkable achievement. This was a place that had, without a twitch of evident stress, multiplied by a factor of ten since the late 1950s and yet was still a park.”. Unfortunately Bryson never made it to Brisbane, so I didn’t get to see him turn his wit on another place I know.

He did, however, get to Cairns, so I got a fabulously funny and dead-on view of Queenslanders and the paranoid persecution complex with which a lot of them regard those dastardly southerners. It was one of a number of things which had me thinking ‘Yes! That’s just what it’s like.’ (Case in point: the persistence of Australian flies.) There was also much that was new to me, such as the mystery of the explorer Stuart, who thought that he and his men were the first Europeans ever to reach the red centre - until they bumped into some locals who greeted them with Freemason signs and knew how to tie bootlaces. And it was interesting to see how alarming many of the things which I regard as normal - the risk of dengue fever, redback spiders, the admonition to freeze if confronted by a snake - must seem to people not accustomed to them.

Rating: A-

Now reading: The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
                                The Secret History - Donna Tartt (TBRC, RIP2C)
                                Mansfield Park - Jane Austen (BTMC)