Whether or not to continue
reading a book that seems “just so-so” is a delicate balance. I’ve heard
arguments from both side of the spectrum:
On the one side, there’s the sentiment
that “Momma Didn’t Raise No Quitter”—that even bad books (for whatever reason,
whether boring or poorly-written or offensive) should be read to completion. I
tend toward this side because sometimes I want to review these books to point
out the specific things that make these books “bad,” and it wouldn’t be fair-minded
to give a poor opinion of only a piece of a work.
On the other side is the equally
valid philosophy that “Life is Too Short to Read Bad Books.” In general I do
this by not even beginning books that don’t interest me, no matter how much
other people may recommend them. Horror novels or novels that are gruesome or
depressing don’t appeal to me, so I skip them in favor of other genres.
The best approach is probably a
middle-of-the-road one, but there is something to be said for sticking to a
book one is not necessarily enjoying. Yes, there have been times I wished I
could demand a temporal refund, that there were hours of my life wasted. But
there have been other times that the end of the book (or, at least, a good
halfway through) was a vast improvement and made all the slogging through
initial chapters worthwhile.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment was like that. The
first part (the Crime) is interesting, but the main character was annoying, and
the other characters weren’t very engaging, either. But then the second part
(the Punishment) steadily ramps up the tension, previously unconnected
characters have their plotlines converge, and I simply loved the ending.
A similar sort of thing happened
more recently with Eleanor Farjeon’s Humming
Bird. The other works I’d read by Farjeon were children’s books, so I began
reading this book with the same sort of expectation. I was promptly confused.
Humming Bird starts out like a first-person retrospective, a woman named
Lisette telling of events that took place in her girlhood, when she went to
visit her eccentric aunt. Her Aunt Charlotte Pye (called Cherry Pie by her
friends) is an interesting, instantly endearing character. Half French, she
lives in the British countryside, in a small house that’s over a sort of
antique/secondhand/rummage/pawnshop that she runs. Her French mother Maman lives
with her, along with a mysterious young woman called Bella.
So far it was simple. Then comes
a vague hint that there’s something fantasy about this story, when Lisette
confides to the reader that she has strange episodes where she stares off as if
in another world, and doesn’t have any recollection of it later. Her mother is
very concerned about this, and warns Cherry Pie to try to keep Lisette from
entering into moods that will lead to these episodes. Lisette also seems to
have a sort of sixth sense: sometimes the atmosphere of a room or the sight of
an object causes her to see or hear things that are almost like residual memories
of things past. Lisette’s parents and aunt may chalk this up to one of her
peculiar moods, but Maman accepts her and makes her feel that these mysterious feelings
are actually normal and nothing to be afraid of.
An additional layer of mystery is
added by the presence of Bella, whose real name is not revealed. Cherry Pie is
the sort of person to rent out rooms to a total stranger, and not care whether
they had a past or not. Lisette’s mom is not as blasé, and immediately suspects
that Bella is a Kept Woman due to visits from a rich gentleman who pays for her
room and board.
Then things get really weird.
REALLY weird. Cherry Pie pulls out a strange music box, a Hummingbird that
sings when a certain spring is pressed. Suddenly (and I’m assuming this is one
of Lisette’s visions) we are no longer in 20th century Britain, but
in Paris during the reign of the Sun King, Louis XIV. The narrative shifts to a
young woman, also named Charlotte, whose beauty and brilliance catch the king’s
eye. She refuses to become his mistress, though, playing on his affection to
get what she really wants: power. Charlotte de Marignan-Croissy is a student of
an artist, and uses her wiles to wheedle things out of him—particularly, information
about a magical paintbrush. But her painting master has already given this
brush to another pupil, Antoine Wattau.
Just as I was getting ready to
settle into a story where Charlotte was the heroine, the plot shifts again,
this time to Wattau, a starving artist who died before his work could be
recognized. (By the way, Wattau was a real artist, and several of his paintings
and the subjects of his paintings are alluded to in Humming Bird, which made is a sort of Magic Realism Historical
Fiction.)
Then, as I began to accept that
this story was about Wattau, the action shifted back to Lisette.
All this back-and-forth between
countries and times and protagonists was beginning to frustrate me, but then things
started to get really interesting when the stuff happening in the Future seemed
to mirror things that had happened in the Past. Not that the characters were
reincarnated, but like similar people have been set in the same relationships
and posed the same choices as the ones in the past. Obviously the two Charlottes
are in the same role, though Cherry Pie is a much nicer version of Charlotte de
Marignan-Croissy. The sinister rich neighbor of Lisette is called Mr. Sonnenschien
(Sunshine)…and has the same motivations as King Louis XIV. Bella is in the same
conundrum of a girl named Finette—a girl who was in love with Wattau, though he
was too immersed in his art and aware of his impending death and could not reciprocate.
With these parallel characters,
it soon became a sort of puzzle. Where, for instance, was the Wattau character?
What happened to the original Finette? What about that magic paintbrush…what
exactly was its power, and why did Charlotte de Marignan-Croissy want it?
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