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----- Forwarded message from spklein52@hotmail.com -----
Date: Sun, 26 Jun 2005 09:40:48 -0400
From: "Sandy P. Klein" <spklein52@hotmail.com>
Reply-To: SPKlein52@HotMail.com
Subject: Ada (more shades of Nabokov) ...
To: SPKlein52@HotMail.com
------------------
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E04EFD91038F93AA25755C0A9639C8B63[1]
BOOK REVIEW DESK
MAD, BAD AND DANGEROUS TO READ
By CHRISTOPHER BENFEY
Published: June 19, 2005, Sunday LORD BYRON'S NOVEL
The Evening Land.
By John Crowley.
465 pp. William Morrow. $25.95.
ALMOST 20 years after the publication of ''Uncle Tom's Cabin,'' in
which she challenged Americans to do something about the horrific
crime of slavery, Harriet Beecher Stowe challenged the British to do
something about the horrific crimes of Lord Byron. In ''Lady Byron
Vindicated,'' Stowe circled like a predatory bird around what she
delicately called his ''improper intimacy'' with his half sister,
Augusta Leigh. Rumors about Lord Byron -- famously ''mad, bad and
dangerous to know,'' according to one of his lovers -- are again
unleashed in John Crowley's intricate and stylish romp, ''Lord
Byron's Novel: The Evening Land.'' Lady Byron (dismissed by one of
Crowley's characters as ''the Wicked Witch of the West'') must be
turning in her grave.
Crowley's premise is a simple one. In the fall of 1813 -- a little
more than two years before his wife left him (because of incest,
attempted sodomy, ''affairs with boys when he was in Greece'' or some
other impropriety) and he departed from England for good -- Byron
claimed he had begun a novel but burned it ''because the scene ran
into reality.'' Crowley conjures Byron's lost novel, phoenix-like,
from the ashes.
The genre of the rediscovered manuscript -- Nabokov's ''Pale Fire''
and A. S. Byatt's ''Possession'' come to mind -- seems peculiarly
suited to our time, when the alleged death of reading runs up against
the textual playgrounds of cyberspace. Fittingly enough, in ''Lord
Byron's Novel,'' Crowley takes advantage of the fact that Byron's
''only legitimate child,'' Ada (more shades of Nabokov), was a
mathematician who worked closely with Charles Babbage, a Cambridge
don who tinkered with codes and ciphers and invented a precursor of
the computer. What if Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace, had come into
possession of her father's lost novel, and what if her control-freak
mother, Lady Byron, had ''wanted it burned''? Might a clever
mathematician like Ada find a way both to save and to delete (so to
speak) her father's creation, preserving it in a numerical code for
future readers?
Crowley, by no means leery of narrative complication, has divided
his book into three parts: the lost novel itself (titled ''The
Evening Land''); Ada's annotations on the novel; and an e-mail
correspondence involving the various people bent on cracking the
code. The principal sleuth is an American historian of science named
Alexandra Novak, who travels to England to update the entry on Ada
Byron for ''an online virtual museum of women of science'' and comes
across the mysterious manuscript, which she decodes with the help of
her partner, Thea (conveniently a professor of mathematics), and her
estranged father, Lee (conveniently a former Byron scholar).
Crowley is less interested in Byron's botched marriage than in his
relations with his daughter. He cites Benjamin Woolley's biography of
Ada, ''The Bride of Science,'' in which Woolley sees the
incompatibility of Lord and Lady Byron as less personal than
historical: Byron represented an earlier generation, devoted to art
and passion, while Lady Byron was part of the emerging Victorian era,
with its preference for science and moralizing rationality. Ada's
''enciphered version'' of her father's novel -- and, by extension,
Crowley's own novel -- can be seen as a synthesis of art and science.
Just as Ada, in Crowley's telling, finds her way back to her notorious
father (''a flawed and inconsistent but ultimately a great-natured and
good and endlessly, wisely entertaining man''), so Alex moves toward a
gradual acceptance of the philandering Lee.
The pages devoted to Alex's e-mail exchanges are incisive and funny
and poignant. ''DONT WRITE TO THAT BASTARD,'' Thea warns Alex about
Lee. ''ITS LIKE CHECKING INTO HELL JUST TO GET KURT COBAINS
AUTOGRAPH.'' Alex turns out to be a livelier literary critic than her
father. Reading an over-the-top description of a bullfight (''Bounds
with one lashing spring the mighty brute'') in Byron's ''Childe
Harold's Pilgrimage,'' she comments, ''Now isn't that exactly like
those scenes in old cartoons set at bullfights, where Bugs Bunny or
Daffy Duck has to be a matador, and the door flies open and the bull
comes out, with steam snorting from his nose?''
THE biggest disappointment in ''Lord Byron's Novel'' is the
deciphered novel itself, a sprawling pastiche of Gothic extravaganza,
Oriental tale and picaresque adventure. Lee's summary, alas, is
accurate enough: ''Well it begins as a Gothic -- the ruined abbey in
the moonlight, the somnambulation -- interaction with scary animals
-- immurement -- a family curse, or evil taint -- flight in the dark.
. . . Parricide, or apparent parricide; a mysterious pursuer, the
hero's double. . . . But then the story seems to lose the Gothic
furniture and becomes a society novel about marriage and affairs.''
This mishmash is meant to be, as Lee remarks, a coded version of
Byron's own life, ''but as in a masquerade.''
Maybe so. But no single page of ''The Evening Land'' could be
mistaken for a page of Byron's. In his letters and journals, Byron
was a great prose writer, at once ironic, concrete and wistful.
Crowley's imitation is flat and clichéd, cluttered with stilted
archaisms like ''I saw that not,'' ''What does he here?'' and ''I
know no other that I may so ask.'' Where Crowley summarizes (''he
crossed the Rhine -- climbed the Alps -- he saw the Avalanche -- the
mountain torrent -- the Glacier''), Byron's journal lingers lovingly:
''Arrived at a lake in the very nipple of the bosom of the Mountain.
-- left our quadrupeds with a Shepherd -- & ascended further -- came
to some snow in patches -- upon which my forehead's perspiration fell
like rain making the same dints as in a sieve.'' Only occasionally
does Crowley strike the right Byronic note: ''I have also attended
two executions, and a circumcision -- two heads and a foreskin cut
off.'' You almost wish that Crowley, instead of trying to imitate
early-19th-century mannerisms, had followed Frederick Prokosch's lead
in his 1968 novel of rediscovered Byroniana, ''The Missolonghi
Manuscript,'' and adopted a racy modern idiom.
Crowley's real achievement in ''Lord Byron's Novel'' is not a
convincing imitation of Byron -- not even Byron, who was pudgy and
pale and walked with a limp, could always pull that off. More
persuasive by far is the suffocating world of encryption and code,
coincidence and conspiracy, paranoia and parapsychology that Crowley
summons from his 19th-century documents and 21st-century decoders.
His fatherless daughters and daughterless fathers search for one
another across this uncannily familiar terrain, longing for a unity
that seems just beyond their grasp. ''Happy endings are all alike,''
Ada Byron slyly observes in one of her annotations, but ''disasters
may be unique.''
_Christopher Benfey is the Mellon professor of English at Mount
Holyoke College and the author, most recently, of ''The Great Wave:
Gilded Age Misfits, Japanese Eccentrics, and the Opening of Old
Japan.'' _
Published: 06 - 19 - 2005 , Late Edition - Final , Section 7 ,
Column 2 , Page 12
Links:
------
[1]
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E04EFD91038F93AA25755C0A9639C8B63
----- End forwarded message -----
Date: Sun, 26 Jun 2005 09:40:48 -0400
From: "Sandy P. Klein" <spklein52@hotmail.com>
Reply-To: SPKlein52@HotMail.com
Subject: Ada (more shades of Nabokov) ...
To: SPKlein52@HotMail.com
------------------
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E04EFD91038F93AA25755C0A9639C8B63[1]
BOOK REVIEW DESK
MAD, BAD AND DANGEROUS TO READ
By CHRISTOPHER BENFEY
Published: June 19, 2005, Sunday LORD BYRON'S NOVEL
The Evening Land.
By John Crowley.
465 pp. William Morrow. $25.95.
ALMOST 20 years after the publication of ''Uncle Tom's Cabin,'' in
which she challenged Americans to do something about the horrific
crime of slavery, Harriet Beecher Stowe challenged the British to do
something about the horrific crimes of Lord Byron. In ''Lady Byron
Vindicated,'' Stowe circled like a predatory bird around what she
delicately called his ''improper intimacy'' with his half sister,
Augusta Leigh. Rumors about Lord Byron -- famously ''mad, bad and
dangerous to know,'' according to one of his lovers -- are again
unleashed in John Crowley's intricate and stylish romp, ''Lord
Byron's Novel: The Evening Land.'' Lady Byron (dismissed by one of
Crowley's characters as ''the Wicked Witch of the West'') must be
turning in her grave.
Crowley's premise is a simple one. In the fall of 1813 -- a little
more than two years before his wife left him (because of incest,
attempted sodomy, ''affairs with boys when he was in Greece'' or some
other impropriety) and he departed from England for good -- Byron
claimed he had begun a novel but burned it ''because the scene ran
into reality.'' Crowley conjures Byron's lost novel, phoenix-like,
from the ashes.
The genre of the rediscovered manuscript -- Nabokov's ''Pale Fire''
and A. S. Byatt's ''Possession'' come to mind -- seems peculiarly
suited to our time, when the alleged death of reading runs up against
the textual playgrounds of cyberspace. Fittingly enough, in ''Lord
Byron's Novel,'' Crowley takes advantage of the fact that Byron's
''only legitimate child,'' Ada (more shades of Nabokov), was a
mathematician who worked closely with Charles Babbage, a Cambridge
don who tinkered with codes and ciphers and invented a precursor of
the computer. What if Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace, had come into
possession of her father's lost novel, and what if her control-freak
mother, Lady Byron, had ''wanted it burned''? Might a clever
mathematician like Ada find a way both to save and to delete (so to
speak) her father's creation, preserving it in a numerical code for
future readers?
Crowley, by no means leery of narrative complication, has divided
his book into three parts: the lost novel itself (titled ''The
Evening Land''); Ada's annotations on the novel; and an e-mail
correspondence involving the various people bent on cracking the
code. The principal sleuth is an American historian of science named
Alexandra Novak, who travels to England to update the entry on Ada
Byron for ''an online virtual museum of women of science'' and comes
across the mysterious manuscript, which she decodes with the help of
her partner, Thea (conveniently a professor of mathematics), and her
estranged father, Lee (conveniently a former Byron scholar).
Crowley is less interested in Byron's botched marriage than in his
relations with his daughter. He cites Benjamin Woolley's biography of
Ada, ''The Bride of Science,'' in which Woolley sees the
incompatibility of Lord and Lady Byron as less personal than
historical: Byron represented an earlier generation, devoted to art
and passion, while Lady Byron was part of the emerging Victorian era,
with its preference for science and moralizing rationality. Ada's
''enciphered version'' of her father's novel -- and, by extension,
Crowley's own novel -- can be seen as a synthesis of art and science.
Just as Ada, in Crowley's telling, finds her way back to her notorious
father (''a flawed and inconsistent but ultimately a great-natured and
good and endlessly, wisely entertaining man''), so Alex moves toward a
gradual acceptance of the philandering Lee.
The pages devoted to Alex's e-mail exchanges are incisive and funny
and poignant. ''DONT WRITE TO THAT BASTARD,'' Thea warns Alex about
Lee. ''ITS LIKE CHECKING INTO HELL JUST TO GET KURT COBAINS
AUTOGRAPH.'' Alex turns out to be a livelier literary critic than her
father. Reading an over-the-top description of a bullfight (''Bounds
with one lashing spring the mighty brute'') in Byron's ''Childe
Harold's Pilgrimage,'' she comments, ''Now isn't that exactly like
those scenes in old cartoons set at bullfights, where Bugs Bunny or
Daffy Duck has to be a matador, and the door flies open and the bull
comes out, with steam snorting from his nose?''
THE biggest disappointment in ''Lord Byron's Novel'' is the
deciphered novel itself, a sprawling pastiche of Gothic extravaganza,
Oriental tale and picaresque adventure. Lee's summary, alas, is
accurate enough: ''Well it begins as a Gothic -- the ruined abbey in
the moonlight, the somnambulation -- interaction with scary animals
-- immurement -- a family curse, or evil taint -- flight in the dark.
. . . Parricide, or apparent parricide; a mysterious pursuer, the
hero's double. . . . But then the story seems to lose the Gothic
furniture and becomes a society novel about marriage and affairs.''
This mishmash is meant to be, as Lee remarks, a coded version of
Byron's own life, ''but as in a masquerade.''
Maybe so. But no single page of ''The Evening Land'' could be
mistaken for a page of Byron's. In his letters and journals, Byron
was a great prose writer, at once ironic, concrete and wistful.
Crowley's imitation is flat and clichéd, cluttered with stilted
archaisms like ''I saw that not,'' ''What does he here?'' and ''I
know no other that I may so ask.'' Where Crowley summarizes (''he
crossed the Rhine -- climbed the Alps -- he saw the Avalanche -- the
mountain torrent -- the Glacier''), Byron's journal lingers lovingly:
''Arrived at a lake in the very nipple of the bosom of the Mountain.
-- left our quadrupeds with a Shepherd -- & ascended further -- came
to some snow in patches -- upon which my forehead's perspiration fell
like rain making the same dints as in a sieve.'' Only occasionally
does Crowley strike the right Byronic note: ''I have also attended
two executions, and a circumcision -- two heads and a foreskin cut
off.'' You almost wish that Crowley, instead of trying to imitate
early-19th-century mannerisms, had followed Frederick Prokosch's lead
in his 1968 novel of rediscovered Byroniana, ''The Missolonghi
Manuscript,'' and adopted a racy modern idiom.
Crowley's real achievement in ''Lord Byron's Novel'' is not a
convincing imitation of Byron -- not even Byron, who was pudgy and
pale and walked with a limp, could always pull that off. More
persuasive by far is the suffocating world of encryption and code,
coincidence and conspiracy, paranoia and parapsychology that Crowley
summons from his 19th-century documents and 21st-century decoders.
His fatherless daughters and daughterless fathers search for one
another across this uncannily familiar terrain, longing for a unity
that seems just beyond their grasp. ''Happy endings are all alike,''
Ada Byron slyly observes in one of her annotations, but ''disasters
may be unique.''
_Christopher Benfey is the Mellon professor of English at Mount
Holyoke College and the author, most recently, of ''The Great Wave:
Gilded Age Misfits, Japanese Eccentrics, and the Opening of Old
Japan.'' _
Published: 06 - 19 - 2005 , Late Edition - Final , Section 7 ,
Column 2 , Page 12
Links:
------
[1]
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E04EFD91038F93AA25755C0A9639C8B63
----- End forwarded message -----