I'm almost ashamed to say that I have not come across Elizabeth Gaskell before. The only reason I stumbled across her work was because of that wonderful entity-the BBC mini-series. What I watched convinced me I would appreciate the written work.

North and South, the novel, was written by Elizabeth Gaskell in 1855. The title refers to the two regions in England. The North was undergoing an industrial and manufacturing revolution at the time, while the South retained it's agricultural roots, resulting in the vast difference in the two regions - in terms of people, culture, work ethic, dress, even poverty.

It is against this backdrop that we meet Ms. Gaskell's protagonist Margaret Hale, who belongs to the rural South. Margaret has lived most of her life in London with her aunt, sharing in her cousin's lessons and at the age of 18 is to return to live with her parents at Helstone, the sleepy little town where her father is a clergyman. To Margaret, Helstone is idyllic with memories of forests covered with fern carpets, long walks and picturesque cottages and gardens.

After Margaret returns home, she perceives the little things that on her visits before she never really took notice of - her parents' married life is less than perfect, her mother continually expressing dissatisfaction with the small income from the current living and the grief they feel over her brother Frederick. Frederick had been part of a mutiny at sea and cannot return to England for fear of his life.

Mr. Hale soon informs his family that he is giving up his position as a clergyman to be a tutor in a cotton manufacturing town to the north of England- Milton. Mr. Hale's decision is based on principle since he has lost his faith and finds he cannot honestly continue any more, but even his wife as well as friends and family cannot commiserate since he's given up a guaranteed income for poverty.

In Milton, Mr. Hale starts off as tutor to Mr. Thornton, the owner of a prosperous cotton mill. Thornton is the epitome of the self-made man. Left poor after his father's death, he and his mother have scraped, saved and worked hard until he is a well-known name in the manufacturing industry. Thornton is inclined to admire Margaret, but she with the particular class prejudice of the time, despises tradesmen and doesn't think much of him even though her father finds him a most apt and interesting pupil, well read and well spoken.

Margaret's prejudices are peculiar since very soon she meets with Nicholas Higgins and his daughter Bessy, laborers who work at one of the cotton factories and becomes great friends with them. But, I guess this was not so outside the norm, the "ladies" were often kind to people who they perceived of a lower class than them carrying them food and medicine when sick. Their disgust was reserved for the people who profited through trade. In Margaret's view the manufacturers with their buying for cheap and selling for profit and manipulation of the market to create demand were dishonest by virtue of doing so.

Due to fluctuations in the cotton market, the workers in Milton go on a strike demanding more money which the masters refuse to (and cannot) pay and this strike forms one of the cornerstones of the novel. With the aftermath of the strike, the lives of the protagonists and their relationship undergo massive upheavals, Margaret going through one of the most harrowing periods of her life.

But, it is from this period of time that Margaret starts to face up to her prejudices and when Higgins defeated from being out of work and unable to support his family comes up with the notion of moving to the South, since he has heard her praise it so often, she is able to give him a more rational picture than what her initial nostalgia had painted. And it is from this point of time that her pride allows her to face up to the growing respect and love she feels towards Thornton, but whose regard she might have lost forever by an act of secretiveness on her part.

Ms. Gaskell's prose is wonderfully dense, containing passages which ought to be ruminated at leisure. Unfortunately I'm not one of those readers who mark stuff as they read, else I would have added some here. She peppers her novel with realistic characters, even the secondary characters like the proud Mrs. Thornton and Higgins, and the mild Mr. Hale making their impact on the reader.

Margaret is a wonderful character, in the beginning full of youthful idealism and high principles which over the course of the novel are tempered to a better understanding of people. Thornton's character is more straight-forward, an honorable man known for plain speaking, in the beginning he considers himself unaccountable to his workers but Margaret's sympathy towards the workers helps him realize the value of opening a dialogue with them. And over the course of the book we get to know to know his thoughts concerning Margaret. A dialogue of his after he has proposed to Margaret and been rejected will probably stay with me a long time, it's so poignant.

"No one loves me,--no one cares for me, but you, mother."

I guess the only thing I dont like is that the author apparently believes in the school of hard knocks for her characters. Margaret undergoes one such trial by fire. At least I can vouch for North and South having a happy ending, expect some prolonged doom and gloom but it's not unalleviated.

Some of the questions and ideas Ms. Gaskell puts forward as to the relationships between management and laborers, the harsh nature of workers unions, religious faith and atheism were quite progressive for her time, as revealed through the prejudices of some of the characters. In fact, I would say that the novel has a certain symmetry to Pride and Prejudice, but with a lot more social and political commentary.

Fans of Austen and Classic literature will find this novel well worth the read.

As for the mini-series the good folks at BBC do know how to put them together dont they. It doesn't follow the book, but all these anal considerations (I should probably link to my rant over Knightley's P&P to better illustrate the craziness .... but I wont) slunk out the window once I set eyes on John Thornton. I believe I'm finally, finally over Colin Firth's Darcy. It's all about Richard Armitage now.



Sigh.

Pride & Prejudice & Zombies by Seth Grahame-Smith is a re-telling of Austen's classic, retaining almost 85% of the original but now with 'ultraviolent zombie mayhem'. I must admit when I first heard of it I was conflicted between excitement (I have a fondness for zombies) and being slightly outraged over what promised to be a bloody massacre of Austen's work. The picture on the cover decided me, as I got delicious chills down my spine from the combination of the lady in innocent-white Regency dress, blood-shot eyes and rotting flesh, I knew I had to read it.

To start with, it's the longest I've ever taken to read P & P (over 3 weeks) even though I laughed a bit over the course of the book. While most of the story is Austen's, Grahame-Smith's voice quickly becomes apparent when it inserts itself into the work. I must mention the hilarious illustrations added through the book, often with zombies, Elizabeth and sharp objects.

And so the premise is that England is stricken with a deadly plague that creates zombies or Unmentionables as they are known. The unmentionables have a fondness for soft, mushy brains and can infect humans with a bite. The militia are sent out to various regions in England to help the local population with the unmentionable menace. The Bennett sisters under the tutelage of Mr. Bennet

The business of Mr. Bennett's life was to keep his daughters alive. The business of Mrs. Bennet's was to get them married.

are a deadly trained team who have vowed to His Majesty to protect Hertfordshire from the plague. Their mother sees ample oppurtunities to get her girls married upon Mr. Bingley (and his battle-hardened friend Mr. Darcy) moving to the neighborhood. However, the Bennett's training under the Chinese masters of the Shaolin earns them the criticism and scorn of the Bingley sisters and Mr. Darcy who have been reared thinking that a "superior" training can be found only under the Japanese masters. Will the Bennett sisters find true love amidst all the violent Katana-wielding, zombie-bashing, ninja-fighting, vomit-strewn pages of this book?

We (and an admiring Mr. Darcy) get the first inkling of the deadliness of the Bennett sisters at the ball where Bingley and Darcy make their appearance and after Darcy has delivered his famous set-down to Elizabeth "She is tolerable, but not handsome enough to tempt me"... Elizabeth instantly desiring to avenge her honour reaches into her ankle boot to remove a dagger with which to slash Darcy's throat when the ballroom is attacked by unmentionables.

As guests fled in every direction, Mr. Bennett's voice cut through the commotion. "Girls! Pentagram of Death!"

Elizabeth immediately joined her four sisters, Jane, Mary, Catherine and Lydia in the center of the dance floor. Each girl produced a dagger from her ankle and stood at the tip of an imaginary five-pointed star. From the center of the room, they began stepping outward in unison - each thrusting a razor-sharp dagger with one hand, the other hand modestly tucked into the small of her back.

The dainty fighting pose made this bit paisa-vasool for me!

Grahame-Smith tends to get raunchy often, inserting scenes, some which have the capacity to hideously rend Ms. Austen's gentle, well-bred world for the reader forever. The following occurs when Lizzy is in Netherfield to help nurse Jane (who has caught a cold from battling zombies in the rain) and the party are gathered in a parlour where Miss Bingley questions Bingley's intention on throwing a ball at Netherfield warning that Darcy would not like one..

"I should like balls infinitely better," she (Miss Bingley) replied, "if they were carried on in a different manner."

"You should like balls infinitely better," said Darcy, "if you knew the first thing about them."

Elizabeth blushed and suppressed a smile-slightly shocked by his flirtation with impropriety, and slightly impressed that he should endeavour to flirt with it at all.

With all the violence here, it's not surprising that the consequences to people in this book are much more explicit than Austen's subtlety. For instance, Charlotte Lucas marries Mr. Collins because she is stricken by the plague and Wickham is rendered paralysed from the neck down as punishment for running away with Lydia while Lydia has to take care of a cripple for the rest of her life.

So, while not perfect (I would have been happier with it as an original work if it contained less of Austen's work), of all the pastiches that seek to take advantage of Ms. Austen's cash cow, I think I have enjoyed this the most. Atleast, it made me laugh.

.... Khaled Hosseini's 'A Thousand Splendid Suns'. As some of you might recall, I didnt like Kite Runner and it took me all this while to work up to the second book. While I wasnt much into the plot, I thought this was the better effort since I liked that it was set against the Afghanistan political backdrop and we got more of an account of political events this time around. However, the end, pretending that the country was just fine after 9/11 made me stop believing everything he had to say. And, that emotional connection that I require with a book just wasnt there.

The interesting thing I found was Hosseini's account of both Mariam's and Laila's feelings when they donned the burqa, both of them felt surprisingly secure and safe from prying eyes. I wonder if this is truly a woman's POV or something made up, because my instinctive reaction - as a woman- is to scoff wholeheartedly. That Laila who is as modern as an Afghani woman could be, being brought up by a progressive father, encouraged to study and forge her own way would have the same reaction as the more unsophisticated Mariam seems unbelievable to me. And the idea that anyone would willingly embrace the loss of freedom. But, maybe I am not sensitive enough to appreciate what the women have been through and where they are in their head.

Also, the thing that totally bugged me and took me right out of the book is the dialogue. In the beginning it wasn't so obvious, but the language quickly attains the cadence of Americanese "It's the whistling, the damn whistling, I hate more than anything", Rasheed saying 'You think?!' to someone at one point of time.

And what irritated me even more was the interspersing of Farsi thrown around in the book. I've said it before but I'll say it again. It does not work logically, because this is a work written in English, but the context is that the characters are Afghani and conversing entirely in Farsi. So, either they talk in Farsi all the time or they talk in English all the time. How can they talk in English with some random Farsi words thrown in? I might have been forgiving of the second language if there was a glossary of terms at the end, or if the words were entirely contextual.

I wont review since I said everything I wanted to say with the Kite Runner.

Have you guys read it? What did you think?

Lila duCann, an ageing opera singer, has returned home to her little Scottish village to bury her father. Burnhead is the kind of small town with a static and nosy population that Lila is extremely scornful of and has tried to dissociate herself from for most of her adult life. Now, returning home, she finds that her father's death has affected her more that she thought and unbidden memories of her last summer there start coming back to haunt her. The summer that she discovered first love, the summer that changed her life forever, the summer that her family, in order to broaden the operatic horizons of Burnhead, decided to stage an amateur spectacle of Puccini's Princess Turandot. Through Lila's flashbacks and memories we come to be acquainted with her mother Fleur, an ambitious ex-opera singer, her clueless father Raymond, Fleur's brother Uncle George, whom Lila has romanticised and worshipped most of her life and Joe, Uncle George's student, come to sing the principal male lead in Princess Turandot. Gradually, a trajectory unfolds of the tragic, eventful summer and an outcome that will change and shape the rest of her life.

Papaya Pit

Puccini's Ghosts by Morag Joss is touted as psychological suspense a la Ruth Rendell but the events of the summer and the big reveal arent really that dramatic. A frail tension exists in the story only because the protagonist who is an unsophisticated, unloved 15 year old doesnt really understand the undercurrents that mark different events that happen around her. But, we as readers have a pretty good idea of what most of the skeletons-in-closets are going to be and so the overall suspense is pretty much lost.

I was very distracted with the author's use of the first person and third person voice, initially it was used to indicate the present and flashback mode, but these gradually become interchangeable as reality blurs for Lila and this didnt really improve the reading experience for me. The author does succeed in finely bringing out the extreme unhappiness of almost every character involved with Lila. However, the larger drawbacks of Puccini's Ghosts like the absence of an engrossing plot and the presence of mainly unlikeable, unsympathetic characters lead me to give this book 2 swans and a not recommended tag.