Book: The Ladies of Grace Adieu
Nov. 12th, 2009 01:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livAuthor: Susanna Clarke
Details: (c) 2006 Susanna Clarke; Pub 2006 Bloomsbury; Illustrated Charles Vess, ISBN 0-7475-8703-5
Verdict: The Ladies of Grace Adieu is a creepy and atmospheric story collection.
Reasons for reading it: I enjoyed Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, and wanted to see how Clarke handled short stories when she was so successful with a particularly long novel.
How it came into my hands: Newcastle-under-Lyme library. They had a really lovely edition, with illustrations and binding that enhance the period feel. This was a physical pleasure to read even though I often can't be bothered carrying hardbacks around.
The Ladies of Grace Adieu is not as outstandingly brilliant as Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, but it does share the same good points, namely a really plausible period ambience, characters who are really sympathetic while not at all modern in their views, and a delightfully creepy sense of the supernatural and brilliantly drawn pre-Tolkien fairies.
tLoGA is a collection of mostly already published shorts covering the decade from 1996 to 2006. They are all roughly set in the universe of JS&MN, with some of them directly connecting to it and others just having the same general style of magic. For me the most successful were those that stuck closest to the fairy tale form, though a version of it free of Victorian or Disney style sentimentality. So On Lickerish hill is Rumplestiltskin as it might have been told in the 18th century of the JS&MN universe, and the only new story, John Uskglass and the Cumbrian charcoal burner is a children's story where you can reconstruct the "original" story from a somewhat bowdlerized and Christianized version.
If anything, the collection suffers from being just a teensy bit too arch. The title story can't actually be a rebuttal to all the people who complained of sexism in JS&MN (as it was written 8 years earlier), but it is a bit too clever-clever in bringing out feminist themes while staying within period. The Duke of Wellington misplaces his horse is a direct homage to Gaiman's Stardust, and in contrast to the way that JS&MN seems to be brilliantly free of any influence since Lord Dunsany, there are a lot of allusions to the cutting edge of contemporary fantasy. The framing introduction by a professor of Sidhe studies in the modern period of the JS&MN universe is sort of cute but sort of annoying. In some ways tLoGA reminds me a little bit of AS Byatt, where the very enjoyable and high quality writing is a little spoiled by literary showing off.
Still, there's a lot of fun in the book and you probably won't hate if you enjoyed JS&MN. I enjoyed Tom Brightwind or How the fairy bridge was built at Thoresby as an original (at least as far as I know) but very traditional in form fairy story, the kind where fairy gifts are not quite what they seem.
Details: (c) 2006 Susanna Clarke; Pub 2006 Bloomsbury; Illustrated Charles Vess, ISBN 0-7475-8703-5
Verdict: The Ladies of Grace Adieu is a creepy and atmospheric story collection.
Reasons for reading it: I enjoyed Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, and wanted to see how Clarke handled short stories when she was so successful with a particularly long novel.
How it came into my hands: Newcastle-under-Lyme library. They had a really lovely edition, with illustrations and binding that enhance the period feel. This was a physical pleasure to read even though I often can't be bothered carrying hardbacks around.
The Ladies of Grace Adieu is not as outstandingly brilliant as Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, but it does share the same good points, namely a really plausible period ambience, characters who are really sympathetic while not at all modern in their views, and a delightfully creepy sense of the supernatural and brilliantly drawn pre-Tolkien fairies.
tLoGA is a collection of mostly already published shorts covering the decade from 1996 to 2006. They are all roughly set in the universe of JS&MN, with some of them directly connecting to it and others just having the same general style of magic. For me the most successful were those that stuck closest to the fairy tale form, though a version of it free of Victorian or Disney style sentimentality. So On Lickerish hill is Rumplestiltskin as it might have been told in the 18th century of the JS&MN universe, and the only new story, John Uskglass and the Cumbrian charcoal burner is a children's story where you can reconstruct the "original" story from a somewhat bowdlerized and Christianized version.
If anything, the collection suffers from being just a teensy bit too arch. The title story can't actually be a rebuttal to all the people who complained of sexism in JS&MN (as it was written 8 years earlier), but it is a bit too clever-clever in bringing out feminist themes while staying within period. The Duke of Wellington misplaces his horse is a direct homage to Gaiman's Stardust, and in contrast to the way that JS&MN seems to be brilliantly free of any influence since Lord Dunsany, there are a lot of allusions to the cutting edge of contemporary fantasy. The framing introduction by a professor of Sidhe studies in the modern period of the JS&MN universe is sort of cute but sort of annoying. In some ways tLoGA reminds me a little bit of AS Byatt, where the very enjoyable and high quality writing is a little spoiled by literary showing off.
Still, there's a lot of fun in the book and you probably won't hate if you enjoyed JS&MN. I enjoyed Tom Brightwind or How the fairy bridge was built at Thoresby as an original (at least as far as I know) but very traditional in form fairy story, the kind where fairy gifts are not quite what they seem.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-26 03:00 am (UTC)I recall it in my teenage years, cycling through the uplands of the county but generally avoiding the industrial squalor and filth of the mining towns and quarries - Coalville, Whitwick, Ashby - but in the middle of it all is a delightful patch of dappled sunshine and running water, a small and astonishingly-quiet oasis of wildflowers and old, old trees.
North-West Leicestershire is cleaner now, so Grace Dieu Wood is not the surprise - or outright astonishment - it used to be. But if there is any actual magic anywhere in the remains of the Charnwood, that is where it'll be.