OVERVIEWS: Odds and ends

[feather_ghyll]

Over the past couple of months, there were two books that I read that I considered posting a review of here, namely, 'Twice Freed' by Patricia St. John (a reread) and 'Miriam' by Jane Edwards (a Welsh language book). But in a way I had too much to say about the former, which is a fictionalisation of the story of Onesimus, the slave mentioned by the apostle Paul in his epistle to Philemon. This is a subgenre I’m ambivalent about, although I did find rereading it spiritually beneficial. It brings the first century Mediterranean region vividly to life, and displays St John’s New Testament scholarship, but I had critical thoughts about how other authors might handle an entirely imaginary story about a child slave, escaping as a teenager and experiencing a conversion as a young man, or his relationships with Eirene and Archippus.

On the other hand, I didn’t have that much to say about ‘Miriam’, which is the coming of age story of the titular character, dipping in and out of her life from a young age to being on the verge of leaving home for university in north Wales in the late twentieth century. I think I sympathised more with her than I would have if I’d read the book when I was closer in age to the protagonist, but I couldn’t quite warm to her. I couldn’t make up my mind whether it was a book for adults or children, although it deals with loss, there’s nothing in it that’s beyond secondary school age pupils. The central relationship of the book ends up being between Miriam and her stepmother Beth, near permanently shrounded in cigarette smoke. I think my main issue with this was although the dialogue was full of rich sayings and robust idioms that makde most spoken Welsh seem inspid and Anglicised, I didn’t think there was much about the writing to elevate the story of a grieving and confused girl growing up, gaining understanding and healing as the years passed.

Ha, I did have something to say!

As for ‘Barbara - Called Binkie’, well, I ploughed on with the collection, mainly shorter multi-chapter stories. The best of them is ‘Verity’s Revenge’ by Estrith Mansfield, which has a certain intensity from the opening sentence, even if the story’s content is as unlikely as all the stories around it. Verity is the daughter of a circus proprietor, who is sent to a school. Miserable at being separated from the circus life and most of its animals, she and her horse do heroics – that’s the revenge, and her father caves and calls her back home. I read this thinking of how making wild animals perform in circuses has essentaially been outlawed in the British isles by now.

Otherwise, we have two more Guide stories: ‘Skylarking!’ features the more traditional implausible adventures that fictional Guides going camping seem to have than ‘Sally to the Rescue’. It’s notable for switching heroines – you think you’re going to be following Jean, but the heroine ends up being Midge. ‘Jennifer’s Return’ features more plausible events up until Jenny’s picture appears in the Daily Mail and then the plot becomes ridiculous. ‘Pamela’s Ambition’ is set in Canada, and it could have been a chapter in a Bessie Marchant book.