Casting Georgette Heyer: These Old Shades edition

These Old Shades is one of Georgette Heyer’s classics. It is a wonderful, romping, rollicking plot of mixed identities and melodrama and girls dressed as boys and love slowly blossoming and cravats and conspiracies and oh! la! ...all things gloriously regency.

The Duke of Avon, Justin Alistair, is often called Satanas by the elite members of the ton: he has known so many women, has conquested so many conquests, blah! Blah! Has a good hand at cards, cares nothing for no one and drowns in his nonchalance. But one night while wandering the streets of Paris he saves a street urchin from the abuse of his older brother.

Avon sweeps the kid from the streets and adopts him as his page. Leon, with his pale skin and reddish curls becomes quite the favourite of society. For who knew Avon to be so charitable with those unfortunate?

Turns out, Leon is actually the adorable French creature Leonine who may or may not be the illegitimate child of someone very significant in Avon’s past.

He’s twenty years older than she; she has lovely hi-jinks and adorable broken English; she worships the ground he walks on and has sworn her devotion for life; he thinks she should be set up with his rapscallion brother Rupert … and… oh yes! There is a KIDNAPPING


So much fun! And so much fun to cast. Casting Georgette Heyer today we’re going to have to toss the role of Avon to our friend Richard Armitage.

Well-played Richard.

Casting Georgette Heyer's Black Sheep

My friend Courtney did the seemingly impossible: she gave me a book as a gift.

This is usually hard for people because they never know what I have or have not read ( I have read pretty much everything it seems) or what I will like and they generally shy away from tempting me with anything but a Chapters/Indigo giftcard.

Not Court. Nope. She found a winner (a few years ago, it would seem ) and held on to her treasure and just knew that she could pop it out at the right time and I would love it.


And I did.

Ladies and gents, I give you the Regency Barney Snaith ( of LM Montgomery's The Blue Castle) Miles Caverleigh from Georgette Heyer's DIVINE Black Sheep

Now Miles, adorable Miles, is part Barney/ part Rhett Butler- --- all delicious regency fun: his boots are too tall for society; his cravat too loose and he has this infuriating habit of making our prim and bright heroine, Abigail Wendover, giggle at the most inopportune moments.

Oh Miles!


But Miles, dear Miles, sees a spark in dear Abby ( who is actually eight and twenty and very very much on the shelf. You see, bloggosphere, no one has "made up" to her ---or out with her in 20th Century vernacular---in EONS and she is being left to wither away whilst caring for her invalid, hypochondriatic sister and the neice who wants to run away with a scoundrel! a rake! a rogue....


oh it is DELICIOUS! and it is all about mature love ( because Miles once eloped with his heart's desire all but twenty years ago, don't you know, and he knows that Abby and he have a preternatural connection and..... )....and I WISH L M Montgomery had been alive to read some of these sentences:


I give you:


"He had nothing to recommend him but his smile, and she was surely too old, and had too much commonsense to be beguiled by a smile however attractive it might be. But just as she reached this decision he spoke, and she glanced up at him, and realized that she had overestimated both her age and her commonsense"



AH AH AH

and there is MORE.....


"She was aware suddenly that her heart, in general a very reliable organ, was behaving in a most alarming way"


and then....


"She had been attracted by his smile, but no smile, however fascinating it might be, could cause a cool-headed female of more than eight-and-twenty so wholly to lose her poise and her judgment that she felt she had met, in its owner, the embodiment of an ideal."




Abby is smart and resourceful with a winsome sense of humour; Miles just enough parts rakish and gentleman with a hidden fortune and a desperate need to win the heart of fair maiden ( and with a dash of sarcasm and a sardonic smile which screams Barney!) and the whole blasted thing is bloody enchanting.

Seriously.

I timed it out so I didn't gobble it wholly and spread over a few pints in the Distillery ( here in Toronto ) on a train ride for work, on the subway and before bed and, seriously chickadees, I am going to start again. From the top.


BECAUSE I AM IN LOVE WITH THIS BOOK!

It is precisely what this woman of eight-and-twenty ( who has fallen hard for a smile more than once, don't y'know) needs to subdue the January chill.


I am all aflutter...

and the best part.... THE CASTING!


why yes!


Jack Davenport as Miles Caverleigh. Won't he be divine?



( I realize this post has no real literary merit and I don't very much care... I have jelly beans aside me, a friday evening devoid of commitment and a heart full of love for a fictional man.... again)

new post: JD SALINGER

Dear world,

stop pretending you like ---or GET--- The Catcher in the Rye. Now that he's dead and there is no chance of him hovering Banquo-like over your shoulder as you pretend to hum harmoniously with his disembodied words--- you can tell the FRAKKIN' TRUTH

you don't like that book

you never liked that book

you don't understand that book

you admitted to saying "oh yes! I love that book!" just because you were afraid to admit you DIDN'T LIKE IT

( you now acknowledge that the aforementioned was a trend that caught on like wildfire after a view sardonically and dishonestly constructed to throw the literary world off forevermore. With banishments! and sneers! extensively expanding its popularity thereafter)


Yes, world, you can now admit ( as you will now find the courage to admit for another book you secretly despise ---that little ditty known as Ulysses by James Joyce) that you are befuddled and bedraggled and would rather read SIDNEY SHELDON because BY GOD! Sidney Sheldon is bad writing but at least you BLOODY UNDERSTAND WHAT'S GOING ON!...


and ... and ... furthermore....


not EVERYTHING needs to MAKE a BOLD statement on the HUMAN CONDITION



and your life doesn't need to be populated by a James Dean rebel named Holden.

nope.

you're moving on.


RIP Salinger. I hope all they find in that secret safe the media is all excited about is decade old Jelly Bellys.

Most Pretentious Columnist of 2009: Leah McLaren

Leah McLaren needs to be stopped. She's a terrible writer; a pretentious and irrelevant columnist and, judging by this youtube video, a dim and inarticulate public speaker.

I felt the need to take her to task here ( as I often do on twitter).

Need more of McLaren's ridiculous take on the literary world? : read this about her evasion of Award Winners.

I'd link to her novel, The Continuity Girl, but like me you may be tempted to seek it out and it would be a complete and utter waste of money.

Ironic that someone so set on defending and brandishing literary fiction like a high-flying banner writes so terribly.

BOO

p.s. I'm not the only one with this viewpoint, check out the Quill and Quire post after her Awards column .... ha ha ha !

To Dance at the Palais Royale by Janet McNaughton

This book has been sitting on my shelf for years and I never picked it up. So, preparing for a bus ride to London for a long weekend, I tossed it in my bag and read it while waiting for the bus then finished it on the bus. It is a quick, lovely, languid read.

Aggie leaves her large family and domestic role as a housekeeper in Scotland to move to Canada in the late 1920s. Toronto's elite hanker after the idea of British and Scottish domestic workers and Aggie has no trouble securing a position in the Deer Park area of Toronto ( near St. Clair West and Yonge).

I live in Forest Hill ( very near where the Stockwood`s mansion would be fictionally set )and felt that I was transported back to a city I love in Aggie`s time. The streetcars rumbled, yes, but over tracks still primitive and new; Royal York on Front Street had not finished completion; Union Station ( which McNaughton describes as a hallowed, hollow cathedral ) stood loftily as the biggest building Aggie had ever seen and the mythical Sunnyside park near the harbour was filled with stands selling redhots; dance pavilions; mirth and merriment.

McNaughton spins us into a world of colour and prosperity in a booming post-war Canada. Aggie meets Rose, an indelible flapper; Rodney a posh Queens undergrad who shirks his father`s stock business to pursue history and Rachel, a domestic servant like herself sponsored by an upstanding man named Moshe: who saves her from the travesty of liquidation and hardship in pre-Nazi Poland.

This world: the markets and kiosks of Spadina when clashed with the ferries to Center Island; the upscale Rosedale mansions; luncheons at the King Edward and traipses around Eatons and Simpsons is a finely rendered friction.

McNaughton does well at painting the often invisible line between classes ( and the internal skepticism of jewish residents and other immigrants like Rachel) as Aggie weaves in and out with little more than a fancy dress and a few well-thought lies.

Having experienced all corners of bustling Toronto: prejudice, social injustice, women`s burgeoning roles, sexual awakening and a strengthening independence, she is able to carve her own world and leave her own stamp on the booming city: this includes meeting a wonderfully painted Newfoundlander named Will with a sing-song dialect and a lackadaisical way about him.

Each dialect from each of the worlds Aggie visits ( including her own Scotch dialect ) are perfect.

The story is brilliantly told and unfolds so subtly you are swept up in its simple beauty.

I heartily hope that McNaughton abandons the more stark and futuristic novels of her recent distopian fiction and returns to more yarns like this one.

Beautiful, historical, full of promise. Ending on a shrill, high note that even the lingering Stock Crash ( waiting around the corner like a tiger with teeth pried open ) can sever and mute.

WONDERFUL!

Highly recommended

Jane Urquhart does LM Montgomery: YAWN!

Okay Jane Urquhart,

I need you to know that writing this breaks my heart because I love you. You know I love you. I have told you so. In person. Thrice.


So, because of this love, I was interested to see how you would squeeze the life of my goddess, LM Montgomery, into the specifications of the new Penguin Great Canadians series.

Especially because last year was inundated with Montgomery-this and Centenary-that ( the best offerings being the Rubio biography and that nice little book Waterston wrote linking Montgomery’s prose to life--- those were good times. Then there was the Gammel offering (isn’t there always??) in which, again, she tried too hard and then the Epperly-edited scrapbook which is just as much fun to say as it is to read and Epperly is the greatest thing SINCE Montgomery, so there you are and of course all the Sullivan crap and the prequel. Whew: last year in a nutshell).


So, I was anticipating this would happen eventually and heard it advertised at every Montgomery event I attended ( last year there seemed to be dozens; I was always flitting there and here and back) and I was excited:


You are imaginative, Jane Urquhart ( see Changing Heaven ) and poetic ( Hello, Away! ) and historic ( hello, Stone Carvers) and atmospheric ( See Map of Glass) and perchance more Bronte than Montgomery --- but Maud hankered after the Brontes so caps off to that. And you are graciously and refreshingly fun when you banter with Victoria Holt at IFOA…yet….



Preambling aside, I cracked open this tiny volume and, I really hate to say it, hate to, Jane ‘cause I love you, found The Magic of Wings: The Coles Note version

In any other circumstance, I would be all for your romantic speculation and pretty-decent conceptualization of Montgomery ’s thought processes and intuitive nature but here…. Because there was such a stellar biography to satisfy my every whim and whet this insatiable appetite, I was left going ….. meh.

And then the cover sucked ( which is not your fault)

But, really, this was just unremarkable. Nothing new. Nothing that tilted my perspective ( is that because there is nothing new….. I mean the whole suicide “Revelation”: not so much revelatory to anyone who has followed Montgomery at all? ); nothing that sparked me to clutch my hands to my chest and squee just….


Erm…. Okay. Been there read that.


But Jane Urquhart, I love you. So, I salute you for trying. It just wasn’t needed ( Did I just say that? About a Montgomery book? Egads) and just paled in comparison ( scope and otherwise) to the Rubio.

In fact, at one point, I put this down and picked the Rubio up and settled into something a lot more comfortable and appealing.



But, two thumbs up for coming out and for trying.

death to KINDLE

Dear Bloggosphere,

on the occasion of the Kindle being available in Canada:


Books were invented to be read. READ THEM! Open them, smell them, hold them. Run your fingers along their spines. Give them as gifts, covet and cuddle and coddle them. ….

Books: the platform of imagination, theory, critique, thoughts-taking-form ………. All scintillatingly fit into one harmless little square of paper and ink; of smell and light.


BOOKS Are TANGIBLE! Make your reading experience tangible. Hold your book! Run your fingers on perforated pages; feel the glassy, glossy imprint of a sheen sheet between your fingers.


Or, alternatively, buy a piece of technology and download your words onto an unfeeling ipod. Who wants to curl up with a fireplace, a candle, a blanket and ….an ipod?


This holiday season buy your books from bookstores! Read books! … not files….

Save pdfs and the like for work and blogging and, you know, internet things…..


Books are for reading. Read them. Buy them.


You can’t fit an electric file into a stocking. …. ( perchance you can but not much fun, is it)


This Christmas BOYCOTT the Canadian Kindle, walk into your favourite bookstore and buy a real book.

blog? there's no time for blog!!!

I am too busy watching this over and over again.

( and yes, the dog is canon)