Little Women, by L.M. Alcott

There are times, when you pick up a new book, that it’s helpful to have something of an idea of literary history in general, in the scheme of actually knowing roughly what has appeared in the centuries prior to this book being written. Most of the time this comes in the form of simply being able to spot if a writer (or a film even) uses ideas from, or makes allusions to, older more established works. In the case of the modest and dreary old novel Little Women, it should be noted that at least this piece wears its colours in full view. The Pilgrim’s Progress by the 17^th century English preacher John Bunyan, one of the most widely read books in history (apparently, though I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who’s actually bothered themselves with it), serves as the inspiration, McGuffin, and framework for this supposed classic. From what I understand the story of Bunyan’s work, though his prose is heavy in the way that early-modern English can be, is simple enough to follow; a protagonist called Christian wanders around a land of thinly-disguised metaphor, overcoming the vices of the world by being pious, and eventually receives his divine reward. Such metaphorical ideas include the Slough of Despond, Vanity Fair, the Palace Beautiful, and the demon Apollyon, and each have their echo in everything that appears in Little Women, which the writer is loath to let us forget.

It is the American Civil War, and the March family is distraught that their father has gone off to serve the winning side as a chaplain, leaving them to face their lower middle-class existence alone. There are four teenage sisters: Meg, the pretty one; Jo, the tom-boy; Beth, the shy one; and Amy, the youngster. The mother seems to think that their father’s absence, as well as their shortness of money, presents an opportunity to get these girls straightened out, and so she tells them to follow the example of The Pilgrim’s Progress in combating their childish vices and thereby become, as their father thinks of them, little women. In the course of the following year they get to befriend Laurie, the lad next door with a kindly and wealthy grandfather, and he is gradually drawn into their lives and problems, occasionally bringing in his own.

I cannot admit to liking this book very much. Although rather inoffensive, it feels dull and paper-thin, the writing simple yet  not interesting. One never gets lost while reading this book, though at the same time there is not much to keep the reader interested. I suppose it’s a book mostly about character dynamics, with the interactions between the March sisters and the other peoples in their world taking up most of the story, but there’s nothing really that extraordinary about its telling. L. M. Alcott just has no real character as a writer, and besides telling a story she has nothing more to add than a vaguely patronising tone and an out-and-out morality tale. Speaking of this patronising quality, the narrating voice behind the story tends to get above its station, often cutting uninvited into the narrative and offering their opinion on how things are going, and whether such-and-such was right in how they acted. Even more irritating though, the narrator sometimes bursts right in and calls a halt to the story just to explain something; while this does not happen very often, it is an unpleasant and jarring experience for a reader used to a little more tact or skill in their novels. The most notable examples of this occur in the first chapter, which after introducing a rather confused mess of characters goes on to say: ‘           As young readers like to know “how people look”, we will take this moment to give them a little sketch of the four sisters, who sat knitting away in the twilight...         ’   [Little Women, Scholastic, pg. 12], before promptly giving us such descriptions. If this were not bad enough, Alcott later on takes advantage of the reader’s abilities of imagination by making them do all the work, when upon the March sisters’ emotional reunion with their mother after a brief parting, we are greeted with the words:

‘         I don’t think I have any words in which to tell the meeting of mother and daughters; such hours are beautiful to live, but very hard to describe, so I will leave it to the imagination of my readers, merely saying that the house was full of genuine happiness...    ’   

                                                                                                     [pg. 229]

No writer worth their salt will lay on us such a tender little fart of disappointment as this, lazily backing out of telling part of their own story with the excuse that it is ‘too difficult’ to do so. The book, already tottering as it is, suffers a major demotion thanks to this bare-faced uselessness. Maybe such a scene was not important enough to the overall story to be included, but if so then why did Alcott actually bother to write the whole book? There is no real overarching story here, just the otherwise incidental little character interactions that fill up all two hundred and seventy pages; and if the wondrous reunion of mother and daughters isn’t significant character interaction, then what is? The final straw is right at the end, after giving us an anticlimax as irrelevant to the story as it is to the reader’s interest, we have dumped on us this final paragraph:

‘         So grouped, the curtain falls upon Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy. Whether it ever rises again, depends upon the reception given to the first act of the domestic drama

called LITTLE WOMEN               ’

                                                                                                [pg. 271]

          ‘If this one sells well, I’ll write the sequels’ says Alcott. I dislike the “To Be Continued...” mentality enough; that of refusing to actually complete the story begun here with the vague hint that you’ll have to wait for the next one to find out how it goes, as it seems nothing but cheap and commercial, a wicked attempt to emotionally blackmail the audience into coming back, but to stick such a final paragraph in a book as this is just ridiculous.

I will however add a bone of concession to what has been a fairly negative review so far. There is a vaguely interesting character arc running throughout the novel; that of Jo the tom-boy, by far the most interesting person in the story, and her burgeoning friendship with Laurie the-boy-next-door. Most of the more interesting stuff happens when both of them are present, and Jo’s temperament makes her stand out from her rather interchangeable sisters even when Laurie is absent. I could not work out whether Laurie was going to end up as love interest for her or not, as their relationship, though very close, remains cordial for entire duration. If anything were to tempt me to pick up the second act of the domestic drama called: LITTLE WOMEN, it would be to see how this item progresses. Do they remain friends for life, or will they eventually fall in love and marry? Either way it seems a little less clichéd than I would expect.

All in all though, Little Women is not a good book. While not impenetrable to an average reader, the writing style is dull and the story unchallenging. I liked some of the characters, and though the morals were not unpalatable, it ultimately failed to win me over thanks to the ineptitude of its presentation. As such, I will not be returning for the blatantly advertised second act of this domestic drama, and can only say that there’s not much to be gained from sitting through the first.

Bibliophine

Alcott, L. M.  Little Women. Scholastic Publications: Reading. (1989 [First Published 1868])

Watership Down, by Richard Adams

‘         And Frith called after him, “El-ahrairah, your people cannot rule the world, for I will not have it so. All the world will be your enemy, Prince with a Thousand Enemies, and whenever they catch you, they will kill you. But first they must catch you, digger, listener, runner, prince with the swift warning. Be cunning and full of tricks and your people shall never be destroyed.”                ’

                   [Excerpt from Watership Down, Penguin, pg. 40]

Watership Down is a book about rabbits. They are fluffy and they are cute, with little twitchy noses and big sticky-up ears, and they lollop along with their bounding gaits and they nibble the grass. This is what every child knows about rabbits, so when Richard Adams presents them as terrified creatures battling to survive in a hostile world, fighting with one-another tooth and claw and thinking only of their imminent deaths and the necessity of sex, said child might be very surprised at what they hear.

          The story: Hazel and Fiver are two wild rabbits living in rural England. Fiver is a small and timid little rabbit, yet seems to receive random visions of the future in which he sees their warren being destroyed. Fortunately for him his tougher, shrewder brother Hazel takes him seriously, and after they fail to convince the chief rabbit to evacuate, Hazel assembles a group of other discontented rabbits and they set off to found a warren of their own. Among the group are the clever Blackberry, Dandelion the storyteller, and the tough fighting-rabbit Bigwig. Guided by Fiver’s foresight, they journey overland for whole miles, plagued by men, roads, dogs, weasels, foxes, badgers, hawks, crows and even other rabbits, until they finally arrive at the hill of Watership Down. And that’s just the first fifth of the book. Having braved an overland hike, by no means an easy thing for a group of rabbits, it only occurs to them afterwards that they neglected to bring any females with them. Rather than let their warren die out within a generation and so lose everything they had worked so hard to build, Hazel and company must locate a sizeable number of does (female rabbits), and convince them to settle at Watership Down with them; a task that can only be achieved at the neighbouring warren of Efrafa, and by dealing with the tyrannical and bloodthirsty rabbit General Woundwort.

          I like the way that this book tells a story from a rabbit’s-eye perspective. It’s by no means a world of sunshine and fairy dust, as Walt Disney would have wanted it told, but is instead a brutal and terrifying place where everything and anything is out to kill and eat you. As a rabbit, one is constantly on guard, under stress; everything in the world is huge and hostile, and one false step could lead to death. In addition to this, because the rabbit’s world is much smaller than that of other creatures’, there are so many things that Hazel and his companions do not understand. The concept of a raft, for instance – of a large thing that floats on water, which could be used to support other things to float on water – is something that completely flummoxes Hazel when he first sees it. 

          The world of the rabbits is enhanced by the occasional intrusion of some sort of ‘rabbit language’, in which odd words, terms and phrases are occasionally slipped into the narrative. It’s by no means on the scale of Tolkien and his ‘Elvish’ languages, and I’m not sure it does all that much to improve the overall texture of Adams’ rabbity world, considering that rabbits would not have a spoken language anyway – it seems a little unnecessary to conjecture about whether or not they would need specialised spoken words for things. There are however two words in particular that are used most often, and have the most potential use within the story as well as in English; those are Owsla, the generic term for a rabbit warrior caste, whose role varies from warren to warren between a simple police force, right up to an army. The other is silflay, a beautiful word that simply means ‘to go above-ground and feed’. Rather than going topside to eat, one just has to silflay. 

          If there is something about the book that I do not like, then it is the actual style of the writing, the telling of the story. There’s nothing bad about it, except maybe it feels a bit stilted at times, a little formal and too devoted to telling rather than showing, which makes it feel somewhat slow and rather grey at times. This makes the characters seem a bit dull; by no means lifeless, they do however take a while in gaining any higher merits as characters in their own right. As a criticism this is flimsy, I know; and that’s because it is. I am doing no more than nit-picking, because otherwise this book is nothing less than a solid, well-crafted piece of modern literature worthy of unending praise; yet when I read it through, I could not shake off one or two little niggling doubts about it. But it’s really good, believe me; I’m just trying to explain why I was not wholly bowled off my feet by it. Think of it as an antique silver sugar-bowl, gorgeously crafted and patterned, but a little scuffed and unpolished in places. Something like that I’d still happily put on display, and anyone who sneers at it can kindly get out of my tree-house.

          What I said before about the characters, about them being a little underdeveloped and some of them perhaps being a little interchangeable in places, ignore it. Watership Down is not a short book, and as in the case of The Iliad which I reviewed a couple of weeks ago, you get to become familiar with the characters as they slowly take on a life of their own. Though Hazel is bit of a boring protagonist, as the story progresses you can’t help but take on a respect for him, and that’s nothing compared to how one feels about the brash and up-and-coming Bigwig when he finally faces down the General. By the time that Woundwort and his various cronies enter the story, each character has grown into such an entity in their own right that we are left in no doubt as to what is happening, and how tense the trials have become.

          And boy do things become tense! From the early chapters in which the rabbits must navigate the life-threatening hazards of rural England, through to the night-raids on Nuthanger Farm and the eventual confrontations with Efrafa, the story is very good at ramping up the stakes – somehow making a simple hike for survival pale into insignificance when the survival of the new warren is on the line. The climax of the book is awesome, by the way, and takes on almost Homeric proportions as the characters of Bigwig and Woundwort prove themselves to be something of a modern-day Hector and Achilles. It is by no means a book that peaks too early, and I can only stress how, as Watership Down gets going, it really gets going.

          Altogether, I feel that this book is a story about coöperation between rabbits in the face of adversity. The rabbits have to work together to survive, and they learn to adapt in ways which rabbits would not ordinarily be able to do; such as boating, construction of the elaborate ‘Honeycomb’ in the warren, Bigwig’s leadership when dealing with Feline aggression, and even General Woundwort’s uncanny management tactics in Efrafa. But the best illustration of this is through the character of Kehaar the seagull, whom Hazel and Bigwig befriend by offering food and shelter. Hazel recognises the many limitations that rabbits have due to their size, timidness and lack of flight, and by doing Kehaar a good turn he gains a powerful ally for his warren. Kehaar on his part becomes a most useful friend, going above and beyond the repayment of a favour by essentially giving the rabbits a means to survival, fighting on their behalf as their own secret weapon. Kehaar is one of the best characters in the book, strange and alien to the rabbits, a little scary and difficult to understand at times, yet he is a firm friend and more than worthy of respect.

          All in all, Watership Down is a ruddy good book; maybe a slog at times, it is nevertheless a good and rewarding story, profound at times and gripping at others, filled with originality, poise of character and a cracking finish. In here we find some of the most humble creatures of all, the lagomorphs, treated with as much keenness and respect as most writers give to their fellow humans, and so I can give it a clean bill of health. Read this book.

Biblioship Down

Adams, Richard. Watership Down. Penguin. (1974 [First Published 1972])