REREAD: A Song for Summer
Jul. 6th, 2019 08:33 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
feather_ghyllA Song for Summer: Eva Ibbotson Quickbrew, 1998
Unless if I mis-tagged it, I don’t think I posted about ‘A Song for Summer’ here when I first read it.
It features similarities with Ibbotson’s other romances. Most of it is set before the events of ‘The Morning Gift’, and then there’s some overlap timewise, with the ratio of time spent in Austria and England reversed. The characters in both books could almost cross paths. Then there’s the link with opera shared with ‘Magic Flutes.’ But what struck me about ‘A Song for Summer’ is that the story never quite goes where you expect it to. This comes across as realistic and keeps you interested, until the end.
For me, ultimately, the final choices and lopsided structure – Part 1 is most of the book - suggest that Ibbotson wasn’t in control of the story, or found too many resolutions too easy, perhaps too like fairy tales for a story set partially in wartime and its atrocious build-up. Perhaps she found inspiration from opera for the final reconfiguration of two (unhappy) couples and two lonely single people into three new, better couples. But I thought she tried too hard to work the theme of renunciation into the book.
And the hero’s response to a great trauma oversets the book. The trauma itself makes sense, the symbolism of home going up in flames, as many others will be in the coming war, is powerful. The hero is taking his new fiancée, after both thought they had to give the other up for friendship, for art, to his home – a home blessed by storks and the love between his parents. For that home to be smashed up and his parents killed by a Nazi sympathiser is devastating. His response is to turn away from his loves – his fiancée and music - because he wants revenge on the perpetrator…and then he joins the Czech Air Force. And he couldn’t be too set on revenge if he turned to Bach for spiritual consolation. His behaviour is tonally odd, unconvincing and rocks the balance of the book.
I’m also wondering whether Ibbotson was too tied in to her initial plan for the story, that is, that she always intended for Ellen to end up in the damp red-bricked house in the north of England for a time, but the story of the school at Hallendorf just grew and grew on her. She somehow couldn’t adapt to respond to the story as it was going along.
The beginning of the book introduces us to Ellen Carr, brought up in a suffragette household, she tests her mother’s belief in a woman’s ability to do anything by learning at her grandfather’s housekeeper’s knee. Rejecting the academic path intended for her. Ellen is gifted at the housewifely arts, trains, and takes a job as a housekeeper in a school in Austria. Hallendorf is no Chalet School. Run by an idealistic Englishman with a left-leaning multinational staff, it’s situated in a castle, its curriculum focuses on the arts, and it’s a place for rich parents to dump troubled kids. Ellen sees unhappy children and a need for cleanliness, order and boundaries, which previous housemistresses have failed to provide. Ibbotson is subtly funny about the staff and pupils’ great talk of the proletariat and complete disconnect with local working people, and pointed about the rejection of religion and social mores that have served communities and their children well over years.
Marek is at first a name, to Ellen, although she suspects he may be an ally before she meets him, as he’s more practical than colleagues who like to swim naked in the nearby lake, or refuse to give babies nappies. As Ellen does, we gradually realise that he’s more than he seems, and slowly get to know Marcus von Aberg (trademark move: defenestration) and why this great talent has given up his music. The title is one of his works.
They work together for the children. Up till now, Ellen has attracted unsuitable men who she treats kindly (and perhaps thus gives false hope to). By the time she realises how much she cares for Marek, he has completed what brought him to Hallendorf and is about to return to music. Will Viennese opera and his former lover or the wide vistas of America claim him? How can a few kisses with Ellen compete?
Ellen is likeable, despite being both brilliant at domestic arts and beautiful. I say ‘despite’ because it is rather challenging when one’s knee-jerk reaction is to denigrate those attributes because so often that is all that has been and is expected of women. Ellen is not perfect – her tendency to self-sacrifice makes her predictably unhappy. But she transforms the lives of several of the children under her care.
And yet, that event, or rather Marek’s reaction to it, that splits parts 1 and 2 sticks in my craw. All the nobility, missed opportunities and misunderstandings that follow until ‘all is made right’, and the loveliness of the return visit to Austria failed to have such an impact on me because of it.
Unless if I mis-tagged it, I don’t think I posted about ‘A Song for Summer’ here when I first read it.
It features similarities with Ibbotson’s other romances. Most of it is set before the events of ‘The Morning Gift’, and then there’s some overlap timewise, with the ratio of time spent in Austria and England reversed. The characters in both books could almost cross paths. Then there’s the link with opera shared with ‘Magic Flutes.’ But what struck me about ‘A Song for Summer’ is that the story never quite goes where you expect it to. This comes across as realistic and keeps you interested, until the end.
For me, ultimately, the final choices and lopsided structure – Part 1 is most of the book - suggest that Ibbotson wasn’t in control of the story, or found too many resolutions too easy, perhaps too like fairy tales for a story set partially in wartime and its atrocious build-up. Perhaps she found inspiration from opera for the final reconfiguration of two (unhappy) couples and two lonely single people into three new, better couples. But I thought she tried too hard to work the theme of renunciation into the book.
And the hero’s response to a great trauma oversets the book. The trauma itself makes sense, the symbolism of home going up in flames, as many others will be in the coming war, is powerful. The hero is taking his new fiancée, after both thought they had to give the other up for friendship, for art, to his home – a home blessed by storks and the love between his parents. For that home to be smashed up and his parents killed by a Nazi sympathiser is devastating. His response is to turn away from his loves – his fiancée and music - because he wants revenge on the perpetrator…and then he joins the Czech Air Force. And he couldn’t be too set on revenge if he turned to Bach for spiritual consolation. His behaviour is tonally odd, unconvincing and rocks the balance of the book.
I’m also wondering whether Ibbotson was too tied in to her initial plan for the story, that is, that she always intended for Ellen to end up in the damp red-bricked house in the north of England for a time, but the story of the school at Hallendorf just grew and grew on her. She somehow couldn’t adapt to respond to the story as it was going along.
The beginning of the book introduces us to Ellen Carr, brought up in a suffragette household, she tests her mother’s belief in a woman’s ability to do anything by learning at her grandfather’s housekeeper’s knee. Rejecting the academic path intended for her. Ellen is gifted at the housewifely arts, trains, and takes a job as a housekeeper in a school in Austria. Hallendorf is no Chalet School. Run by an idealistic Englishman with a left-leaning multinational staff, it’s situated in a castle, its curriculum focuses on the arts, and it’s a place for rich parents to dump troubled kids. Ellen sees unhappy children and a need for cleanliness, order and boundaries, which previous housemistresses have failed to provide. Ibbotson is subtly funny about the staff and pupils’ great talk of the proletariat and complete disconnect with local working people, and pointed about the rejection of religion and social mores that have served communities and their children well over years.
Marek is at first a name, to Ellen, although she suspects he may be an ally before she meets him, as he’s more practical than colleagues who like to swim naked in the nearby lake, or refuse to give babies nappies. As Ellen does, we gradually realise that he’s more than he seems, and slowly get to know Marcus von Aberg (trademark move: defenestration) and why this great talent has given up his music. The title is one of his works.
They work together for the children. Up till now, Ellen has attracted unsuitable men who she treats kindly (and perhaps thus gives false hope to). By the time she realises how much she cares for Marek, he has completed what brought him to Hallendorf and is about to return to music. Will Viennese opera and his former lover or the wide vistas of America claim him? How can a few kisses with Ellen compete?
Ellen is likeable, despite being both brilliant at domestic arts and beautiful. I say ‘despite’ because it is rather challenging when one’s knee-jerk reaction is to denigrate those attributes because so often that is all that has been and is expected of women. Ellen is not perfect – her tendency to self-sacrifice makes her predictably unhappy. But she transforms the lives of several of the children under her care.
And yet, that event, or rather Marek’s reaction to it, that splits parts 1 and 2 sticks in my craw. All the nobility, missed opportunities and misunderstandings that follow until ‘all is made right’, and the loveliness of the return visit to Austria failed to have such an impact on me because of it.
