Love stories and happily ever afters.

I saw this over at Mark Shea's the other day.

(For the love story of UP, go here.  For my previous thoughts on Twilight, go here and here.)

I have often heard this sentiment echoed, particularly among people who are... more mature, shall we say?... than the average reader of Twilight.  But what is it about this love story of Up, told with no words, that sets it apart from the best selling romance novel of our time?  To answer that, let's begin by looking at Twilight.

In terms of overall plot, Twilight is a standard romance, or fairy tale, in that it begins, in fact if not in actual words, with: "Once upon a time..." and it ends "...and they lived happily ever after."  In the case of Twilight "ever after" is literally that:  they will live forever, together.

I do not call it a standard romance or a fairy tale as a criticism.  Quite the opposite. Meyer has recognized a truth in story telling:  people love reading the same story, or the same kind of story, over and over again. It was very popular in the Renaissance, for example, to write and perform plays that told the story of the ghost of a murder victim, who visits their closest male relative and demand revenge.  The male relative would put on a disguise (sometimes feigning insanity) and often put on a play within the play, in order to lull the intended target into a false sense of security, all the while furthering their plans of vengeance.   In the end, the vengeance is achieved but, the revenger is swept up in his own revenge, and destroyed.  Many plays of this type were written, including The Spanish Tragedy, The Revenger's Tragedy, The Atheist's Tragedy, and some other play set in the rotten state of Denmark, whose name escapes me at this time.

This tendency is not merely limited to the past.  I think of the story of an orphan boy, who is bullied and downtrodden, who turns out to have The Power To Save Us All From Evil!!!! The boy suffers many trials, is tempted to do evil, but resists, and, in the end triumphs and saves everyone.  I am, of course, speaking of Star Wars (the real one.)  Or is it Harry Potter?  Perhaps I meant King Arthur.  Or Spiderman.  Maybe I even meant Star Wars (the fake one).   We tell that story because it appeals to us.  We like it so much we tell it over and over again, creating new characters and new trials, but always maintaining the same shape. 

So 8it is with Romance stories, Twilight included.  The couple meet, and tension develops between them.  Sometimes it is love at first sight, as Edward loves Bella almost from the first time he sees, or rather smells, her.  Sometimes it is hate at first sight, which can lead to terrific tension between the future lovers.  There is a reason why Pride and Prejudice follows the story of Lizzie and her tempestuous relationship with Darcy rather than the tame love match between Jane and Bingley.  The love/hate  relationship is better suited to creating tension, frustration, and thereby, plot and a story.  The problems are resolved by the two recognizing their love for each other, recognizing that they were made for each other, and then they marry and live happily ever after.

Since there is very little tension between Bella and Edward, and they admit they were made for each other very early on in the story, the tension that fuels the story must come from outside the lovers.  Complications with other vampires, or with werewolves, or still more vampires, and more, are what drives their story.  In the end, all the complications are overcome.  Bella becomes the vampire she was always meant to be, she has her daughter, her husband- even more so that they are now equals- and her best friend.  They will all live throughout eternity. loving each other so simply and purely that it isn't worth the effort to tell the story, and if that story is ever told, it will be because some new threat, some new vampire shows up and interrupts their little Eden.

That is the way with the fairy tale and love story.  Tension fuels the story, resolving the tension ends it.  Happily ever after is left unspoken and unwritten because it is undramatic.    They love each other.  They have each other, now and forever.  They expect the feeling to last throughout their immortal lives.  The end.  As is the case with almost every other fairy tale and romance story, happily ever after is hinted at and alluded to.  It is never written.  Two people leading a happy life would be a very boring story.

Except in the hands of Pixar, for the story of Carl and Ellie is exactly what is missing from Twilight and virtually every other romance story, for this is the story of Happily Ever After.

We get just a few vignettes from their life, with only a few words spoken when they first meet, as children:  After Ellie leaves Carl on their first meeting, the next we see of them is their wedding day, years later.  In between, and what is missing, is exactly the part of the story that a Romance novel would tell, and their story really begins when a Romance ends.  It is not an easy time, by any means.  It is a story of hopes and dreams, some met, others not, and life interfering with their plans.  And through it all we see how they love each other, in joy and in sadness, finding joy in each other and taking comfort in each other in the small things that make up married life:  cleaning the house, picnics, unexpected troubles. 

Carl and Ellie have an ending which is problematic, an real.  They know real pain, real heartache and loss. But through it all, they have each other.  Until, of course, the happily ever after comes to an end with the death of Ellie.  But Ellie reminds Carl, from  beyond the grave as it were, with her adventure book, that her death is not the end of everything for him, and UP becomes the story of how Carl learns to live again without Ellie. Happily ever after goes on, as Carl becomes a friend to the boy, Russell, and the Dog, Dug.  He shares Ellie and their love of adventure with Russell, helps the boy find his own happiness, and the happiness that was in their lives spreads out and moves on, touching lives.  His happily ever after becomes a happiness that is shared, as it was with Ellie, and will move one, even after he is gone. 

What Twilight offers, instead, is euphoria. It is the heady, brief feeling of falling in love, which Bella and Edward believe will last, literally, forever. I suspect that, were there a real Bella and a real Edward, they would eventually get bored with each other, and those long eternal years would become an eternal prison sentence. I think of the final scene of the Twilight series, where Bella discovers that she can let Edward, who is a telepath, read her mind, She has just removed the one thing Edward found so enticing about her: her mystery, the fact that she was the only one in all the world whose mind he could not read. I imagine he would be greatly disillusioned to discover that, in the end, she was simply an average teenage girl. But that is simply my take on the matter. For her part, she has sacrificed family and friends to be with Edward. All they have is each other. Stephanie Meyers has no qualms about this: The ending is represented as a fulfillment and unproblematic.  Their happiness is theirs and theirs alone.  They wanted each other, and now, that is all they will ever have.

There are those- a great many, judging from the sales of the books and box office at the movies- that Twilight offers an ideal vision of love and Romance: eternal teenagers forever enraptured with each other to the exclusion of all others.  But there are those of us who prefer the vision of Up instead, the love that lets others in, grows and changes with the years, ever new and ever the same.  The happily ever after envisioned in Twilight is a fantasy and a deception, and it is not something I would wish upon my worst enemy.  The story of UP, its happily ever after, is what many of us crave in our lives: rather than fleeing from death, we recognize that our end will come in its time, and we seek to give our happiness to others, to share and pass on in their time. 

short book reviews

Or perhaps ruminations on a few books I have read or am reading now.

I don't have much time for reading anymore, much is the pity, and I do miss it.  My education very nearly drove the love of reading out of me, by forcing me to read books no one but an academic would read, but I managed to hang on to some of it, at least.  I do look for books that sound like they may be good ones, and take recommendations from acquaintances and co workers.  I often find my tastes diverge greatly from theirs, but I have run into a few gems.

I am mostly ambivalent about the ones I've read lately on recommendations.  Both books I am writing about now have been out for a while, but, as I normally don't read anything written in the last three hundred years, they are comparatively new.  The first is Ken Follett's Pillars of the Earth.  I had heard much about it, and I had high expectations.  The book wasn't as good as I thought it would be, though it did have some moments of excellence.

If you are unfamiliar with the story, it is about a priory in England during the Anarchy (the time period in which the Cadfael series is set)  and the various characters involved in building, or attempting to thwart the building, of a new cathedral, while events from without and chaos from within threatens to upset the project every few chapters.  The Good Guys are suitably virtuous and the Bad Guys completely wicked.  I admit I was pleased with the character of prior Philip, who was the ideal monk.  He is portrayed with no tongue in cheek, no dark secrets. He is simply a perfect monk.  His opposite is Bishop Waleran, a scheming corrupt man who believes the ends justify his means.  On the lay side we have Tom Builder, who begins building the Cathedral, and Jack Jackson, who completes the Cathedral, and their evil nemesis, William, a perfectly loathsome character drawn with no redeeming qualities whatsoever.  There are also the women, Aliena, and earl's daughter and Jack's love, and  Ellen, Jack's mother, and Tom's wife.

The novel is an interesting portrayal of the building of medieval cathedrals, a topic in which I have always been curious.  The novel also gives an answer to the old question, why would anyone start building one of these cathedrals, knowing they would never see it completed?  The novel's answer is so simple it has to be true, unless one believes in Mencken's dictum that for every complicated problem there is an answer which is simple, neat, and wrong.  The novel's answer to the problem of why would anyone start a one hundred year long building project is simple:  Having a building project you would not live to see completed meant you had a job for the rest of your life.  This is what Tom thinks when he gets the job.

In my mind, Tom, the master builder, should have been the main character in the book.  Tom has been a builder all his life, and once worked on a cathedral before, helping to finish off one in the old Romanesque style, and he dreams to build another.  The fire that destroys the priory's old Cathedral gives him that chance.  Unfortunately, he is killed when William burns the town to the ground, his cathedral barely begun.

Jack eventually takes over.  While Jack is arguably the main character of the book, he is also, in my opinion, the weakest and the most lame.  Jack, it is stated, is an atheist, building a medieval cathedral, and the cathedral he builds is so awesomely beautiful, people gaze at it in wonder.  First problem:  There were no atheists like this in the Middle Ages.  It was simply impossible.  Jack is like a first year university student atheist:  he knows a few things, has it all worked out.  It is relatively easy to be an atheist today, because we have alternative beliefs and explanations that simply did not exist back then.  He disbelief is an anachronism.  

Speaking of Jack as a first year university, his story gets even more implausible.  He leaves the town for about a year or two, travels a little in France, works at a few churches there, ends up in Spain where he reads some of the old works of Greek Mathematics.  He comes back after a year- one year- and takes over the building of the cathedral.  He changes Tom's Romanesque design to the new Gothic style, which he saw once or twice in France.  Oh, and he invents Flying Buttresses.  Seriously.

I am willing to suspend my disbelief in my reading, but a suspension of disbelief does not mean, as the saying goes, that you hang disbelief by the neck until it is dead.  First, men who travel abroad for a single year, perhaps two do not come back having figured out everything there is to know about building the architectural wonders of their age.  Secondly, atheists, in my experience, do not build breathtakingly beautiful churches.  The build Wotruba Churches.
 
But that is the weakness of the story.  The strength, in my mind, lies is the tale of Prior Philip and his war with Waleran, and how every time he is knocked down, he rises again stronger than before. 

The best scene in the novel occurs fairly early on.  It is the scene where the boy Jack decides to burn down the old Cathedral.  there is a long description of him sneaking in after the monk's prayers, finding his way into the space between the ceiling and the roof, and debating whether or not he should.  (his motivation, by the way, is that his family is starving and Tom needs work. If they needed Tom to build a cathedral, they wouldn't be starving any more.)  He lights it up, and then realizes he has no way out.  He dodges the flame, and ultimately escapes through the broken tower of the cathedral.  What makes the scene, is the following chapter, where Follett makes exquisite use of the "meanwhile..." clause, and shifts the perspective over to Prior Philip in his study.  Philip, the newly elected prior, has been going over the books of his monastery, and has been making his plans for the future.  He will rationalize the way rents are paid, update the farming techniques.  In a few years, he should have the monastery on a sound financial footing.  He plans on making the monastery profitable- for in the increase of God's Kingdom on Earth, of course- and then, when the financial situation is brought into control, and the monastery is growning, then he will try and fix up the old Cathedral.  Should take less than ten years all told.  What was that sound?  Must be some young monk slamming a door.  At any rate, next, Philip will... and so on.  I just loved the delicious irony of Philip's beautiful and carefully constructed plans being presented to the reader just as they were, literally, going up in smoke, though Philip knew it not.

The book was recently turned into a tv movie, but I didn't much care for it.  It had none of the book strengths and all of its weaknesses.  The book had good chunks, and not so good chunks. I neither recommend or condemn it.

The other book I've started to read, also at someone's recommendation, is A Game of Thrones.  I had heard much about it, many good things, rather like I heard many things and much praise of the Da Vinci Code.  It seems I never learn.  Currently, I am about 150 pages in.  I'll give it another hundred, and then decide whether or not to continue, or set the book aside.

My issues with this book are few, but significant.  The book is well written, I admit it.  What we have here, so far as I have read, is a large cast of characters, most of whom are lining up for a position to take the throne, or benefit from someone else taking the throne, set in a world of the Perpetual Middle Ages type.  My main problem is that I simply do not care about any of the characters I have encountered thus far.  It does not matter to me if any of them take the throne, or hold the throne, or get stabbed in the eye, or eaten by a dragon. This is a world in which there are no real good guys, and no real bad guys, (or, more accurately, everybody seems to be a bad guy, more or less) just ambition and power. 

Another thing which I am starting to dislike is the amount of sex in the book.  It is not graphically described, and is rather casually mentioned, but it is a constant. (Follett, I should note, had a couple of far more graphic and laughably bad sex scenes in Pillars.)  It is frequently perverse, though described as normal.  So far there has been threatened incest, actual incest (twincest, actually) ephebophilia (a young girl of about twelve or thirteen who originally thought she would eventiually marry her brother is sold by her brother to be the wife of a much older man. On her wedding night the man, against her expectations, instead of taking her roughly instead caresses and excites her to the point that she begs him to take her), and an orgy.  None of this is presented as being wrong, just the customs of the people.  After all, they consented, and that's what really matters, right?  Right.

It may be that the sexuality is being used as a place mark to show the morality of the characters.  It is the truly loathsome- or more loathsome than usual- characters who indulge in the worst. I suspect that is the case here, although it may also be that this is a kind of philosophical product placement, an attempt to normalize aberrant behaviour by presenting it as normal, natural, cultural, just one of those things.  I should also point out that,as far as the charge of ephebophilia is concerned, it was common in the Middle Ages for young girls to be handed in marriage, with or without their consent, to much older men.  Daenerys may simply be trying to make the best of it.  I may find out should I continue.

Certainly, the author is pulling out the stops to make his characters loathsome.  He sets up little scenes where it seems like something will be reconciled, only to twist the knife.  When Jon, the bastard, goes to say farewell to his gravely injured half brother, the mother of the brother, calls Jon back as he is leaving, using Jon's name for the first time, and instead of reconciling to him in their shared grief, tells him that he should have been the one who is lying at death's door.  Again, at the wedding of Daenerys (the girl I mentioned earlier), as she is about to leave with her new husband, her brother calls to her, and, instead of bidding her farewell and wishing her some joy, threatens her with worse punishments than he has ever given her before if she does not please her new husband. 

So the characters are, it seems, intentionally despicable.  Perhaps he plans to make it so we enjoy the miserable ends.  A dangerous game for an author to play, but  Martin seems to have pulled it off for many readers, at least.  The books are very popular, and have been turned into a television series.  I'll give it another hundred pages.