Author: Jane Austen
Publisher: Audiobooks
Rating: TBD
This is my penance for even thinking I could get anywhere with the Jane Austen friggin' Book Club'd o'er the head in a dark and dirty back street leaving you robbed and bleeding. Ahem. Now where was I? Oh yes! This epistolary novel (yes indeed, e-pistles are electronic pistils, don't you know?) is really the first thing Austen wrote that was worthy of wide publication (not that Austen saw it that way). It's the second of her works that I've reviewed, the first being Pride and Prejudice which I reviewed for its bicentenary.
This novel is entirely in the form of letters (you do remember those, right?), but the BBC, bless their little Billy Cotton socks, did somehow manage to post it off towards the birth of a TV movie, penned by the estimable Lucy Prebble. Whether it ever made it that far I know not. The letters all revolve around the machinations of the eponymous character Susan Vernon, and her plans for both herself and her frail, abused daughter Frederica. Milady is a very attractive woman in her mid-thirties, recently widowed (only "months" ago), and very manipulative. She thrusts herself upon the good will of her sister-in-law Catherine Vernon, who tries to rescue Frederica from her mother's evil clutches. Lady Susan's sole ambition is to get rid of Frederica though marriage to whomever, so she will then be free to find a suitable match for herself, preferably Reginald De Courcy.
There is this huge deal in the writing world that you must "show, not tell"! Yet this entire novel of Austen's consists of nothing but telling! I can see what these back-seat drivers are getting at, but given that the very act of writing fiction is telling, not showing (that's the preserve of the silver screen), I have to wonder why they're so insistent upon simplifying this supposed nugget of wisdom to the point where it's a brilliant three-word definition of meaningless. As a writer, you need to both show and tell, and only you and experience can get it right.
Not a single best-selling writer started out their writing career by scribbling line after line consisting of "I must not tell, I must show" like Harry Potter in Dolores Umbridge's study in pink. Not one single rule of writing was at the forefront of their literary ambition. They simply wrote what the hell they wanted in the way they wanted it because they loved to write and they had something they wanted to say. They happened to hit upon stories which readers also loved to read. Not a one of those addicted readers spent good money on the book in obsessive-compulsive expectation of those writers' heroic powers of showing! Frankly, my dear, they didn't give a damn. All they wanted was a good story, and all-too-often they didn't even care if it was that well-written. They're not looking for classical expository literature. They're not looking for a tour-de-force of writing etiquette. All they want is a really engrossing tale. Most of them really don't care if you show or tell, or if you go stale or smell as long as the story keeps coming.
Don't take my word for it! Just look at the bank balances of a hoard of best-selling formulaic authors for starters (nothing personal, Lissa Price!). They make my case for me. If you want to write grammatically perfect original literature, that's your choice; all you have to be ultimately, as a writer, is prepared to live with what you write even if you can't make a living from it. If you want to show boat and go tell it on the mountain, be my guest, but the bottom line is that none of this matters if you don't sell a single novel.
"Yes, but I'm not in it for the money!" you protest. I don't believe you. Let me prove it to you. What's the most important thing a writer needs to do? The answer is write! If you're not writing, you're not a writer, no matter how many writing help books you've read. So what's the most important thing you need to write? Pen? Paper? Typewriter? Computer? Voice recorder? No! You need the time. If you don't have the time, you can't write. You can stay up all night, work part time, live off your parents, but you cannot argue that the best possible way to have time to be a writer is not to make a living from your writing so you can do it full time without worrying where the rent will come from. Therefore you do care about the money if you truly care about your writing, and to have that money you need to sell some stories.
I have only this "wisdom" to share on the topic: it occurs to me, as it must to you, that not a single one of these authors, teachers, and bloggers who seek to impart, like a sedentary Prometheus, the superheated air of their literary wisdom, is actually a best selling writer! From whence then, are their credentials imbuing them with the authority for proclaiming this advice? And are they truly insensible to this reality: that they are, by the very fact of their failure to "best sell" actually telling us and not showing us?! Why is it that all of these people who publish materials which they're so insistent will help us write best sellers cannot themselves produce even one run-away best seller between them?!
The best way to show, and not tell, is to show us a novel you've published, not tell us you're "working on" your first one. As far as the writing itself is concerned, it's your life, it's your idea, it's your story, it's your self-publishing world. Go to it, go do it.
And now back to our Jane Austen review already in progress. Why the publisher felt a need to lard-up this volume with works from Mozart and others, sad-wiched between the letters is a mystery. I use the term "volume" advisedly, because it was frankly far too loud and therefore more after the fashion of disturbing mentally than divertimenti, as I had urgently to reduce the volume of the music after a quietly-voiced letter was read, thereby taking both my mind and my eyes off traffic for a second or two. Not appreciated!
Having said that, the character voices - read by several people - were really rather good, but they were unable to bring any real life to a story which isn't very lively at best. Yes, Lady Susan is interesting and (were she not a child abuser) would have made a diverting companion had she not been fictional. Frederica's plight is heart-rending, but this novel really isn't a great improvement over the very thing which forced me to read it! Although rest assured I would rather read, straight off, all of the Austen oeuvre in one day than read one paragraph more of the depressing Jane Austen Book Club. So now my penance is done and just to set the fox amongst the Fowler who, based on disk one, tells a lot more than she shows in her best seller, I am going to rate this one by Austen a worthy read!
