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igenlodeI was surprised to discover a copy of an Elizabeth Goudge book I'd never even heard of, let alone read. But I did have a suspicion that as with "The Castle on the Hill" there might be a good reason for that, and unfortunately I was right.
I liked this even less than "The Castle on the Hill", and the prose has much the same pastiche feel to it, as if it were somebody else imitating Goudge's successful style and producing a poor copy. The book is basically a parallel-time/reincarnation romance of a kind that is popular today and was doubtless popular at the time of writing, and which to be honest I've never cared for much in the first place (and it makes no sense to describe Judith Macdonald as Ian's 'ancestress' in the first place when it is made quite clear in the plot that Judith dies a childless virgin). And I found our heroine Judy neither convincing nor likeable; Miss Goudge has written other intensely selfish protagonists -- although they mainly have the excuse of being children -- and managed to make them sympathetic characters all the same, but I'm afraid I was actively disliking Judy before she ever reached Scotland, never mind before the arbitrary romance decreed in her destiny kicked in.
Meanwhile Angus the ancient retainer is simply a Goudge stock character, the grumpy old man with a heart of gold... and I found the idea that he too is apparently physically reincarnated with memories of his identical past self to be a little too much in terms of credibility. And while it isn't the author's fault, in the age of the burger it does feel a little unfortunate to have unknowingly christened your romantic lead Ronald/Ranald Macdonald!
Judy's poetry is just embarrassingly bad, especially when set alongside the quotations from well known literature that she is also reading. I'm not sure if it was intended to be deliberately amateurish, which the text leaves open as a possibility, since Judith's songs are better (though still not really good enough to be worth subjecting us to multiple stanzas!) But again Judy's efforts at poetry are given at such unnecessary length that one gets the impression the author was expecting us to be impressed or at least emotionally stirred by them...
The first moment at which the book actually rang true to me wasn't until halfway through the whole thing, at the very end of Book 1, when it takes a sudden turn into horror: the agony of betrayal and the dreadful idea of possession and the past coming back to haunt you carry an actual emotional punch in the way that none of the preceding romanticised material does. And then Book 2 is like suddenly coming out of a fog; everything clicks into place as soon as we get into the 1745 story, which one suspects is the aspect the author really wanted to write in the first place. (Was the framing narrative possibly at the publisher's insistence?)
The really odd thing is that it is basically the same style; the opening is even a deliberately parallel scene. But what felt previously almost like self-caricature all at once becomes natural to the character and the setting; anyone would think that the author simply couldn't write contemporary novels, but she had already produced the very successful "The Bird in the Tree" (the first Elizabeth Goudge book I ever encountered, and one that instantly won me over).
It's a bit of a cursory canter through the '45, in which Ranald manages by credibility-straining coincidence to turn up at every significant point of the Prince's escape, but it rings true enough. And it helps, I think, that Judith is herself from a Hanoverian family, so the perspective isn't entirely about the romantic Highland clans and their idealism; there's a welcome touch of scepticism that helps avoid the perception that the author is simply serving up a tartan-and-shortbread version of history. It's hard to escape the parallels with D.K. Broster's "The Flight of the Heron" (probably drawing on much the same contemporary sources), but this element of the novel felt well executed to me.
The bit that didn't really work was the 'twist' at the end, where the cause of Judy's nightmares and Judith's self-accusations of betrayal is revealed, and one feels that Broster could have handled that much better. Given that Judith has already given Angus explicit instructions that if necessary he is to "kill the laird" with his own hands in order to save him from the horror of being hung, drawn and quartered, the fact that by her own act she successfully averts that fate --with Ranald's *own* reaction being "You've saved me from them"-- doesn't seem to justify 'the middle window' being a source of horrors forever afterward. (Also it makes no sense to me that the English soldiers completely disappear from that point onward and apparently never come back to discover what happened...)
And it really wouldn't have hurt to give the characters ten minutes or so of snatched intercourse somewhere in the plot to produce the necessary continuing bloodline :-p
The character for whom I felt the most sympathy, unsurprisingly, was Charles, who is basically an echo of Nadine's husband from the Damerosehay novels: a thoroughly decent career soldier who loves Judith, but in an inarticulate way that fails to satisfy her romantic longings. Only Nadine goes back to George Eliot in the end, and Charles simply has to 'do the decent thing' and allow his fiancée to go off with her Designated Soulmate...
I liked this even less than "The Castle on the Hill", and the prose has much the same pastiche feel to it, as if it were somebody else imitating Goudge's successful style and producing a poor copy. The book is basically a parallel-time/reincarnation romance of a kind that is popular today and was doubtless popular at the time of writing, and which to be honest I've never cared for much in the first place (and it makes no sense to describe Judith Macdonald as Ian's 'ancestress' in the first place when it is made quite clear in the plot that Judith dies a childless virgin). And I found our heroine Judy neither convincing nor likeable; Miss Goudge has written other intensely selfish protagonists -- although they mainly have the excuse of being children -- and managed to make them sympathetic characters all the same, but I'm afraid I was actively disliking Judy before she ever reached Scotland, never mind before the arbitrary romance decreed in her destiny kicked in.
Meanwhile Angus the ancient retainer is simply a Goudge stock character, the grumpy old man with a heart of gold... and I found the idea that he too is apparently physically reincarnated with memories of his identical past self to be a little too much in terms of credibility. And while it isn't the author's fault, in the age of the burger it does feel a little unfortunate to have unknowingly christened your romantic lead Ronald/Ranald Macdonald!
Judy's poetry is just embarrassingly bad, especially when set alongside the quotations from well known literature that she is also reading. I'm not sure if it was intended to be deliberately amateurish, which the text leaves open as a possibility, since Judith's songs are better (though still not really good enough to be worth subjecting us to multiple stanzas!) But again Judy's efforts at poetry are given at such unnecessary length that one gets the impression the author was expecting us to be impressed or at least emotionally stirred by them...
The first moment at which the book actually rang true to me wasn't until halfway through the whole thing, at the very end of Book 1, when it takes a sudden turn into horror: the agony of betrayal and the dreadful idea of possession and the past coming back to haunt you carry an actual emotional punch in the way that none of the preceding romanticised material does. And then Book 2 is like suddenly coming out of a fog; everything clicks into place as soon as we get into the 1745 story, which one suspects is the aspect the author really wanted to write in the first place. (Was the framing narrative possibly at the publisher's insistence?)
The really odd thing is that it is basically the same style; the opening is even a deliberately parallel scene. But what felt previously almost like self-caricature all at once becomes natural to the character and the setting; anyone would think that the author simply couldn't write contemporary novels, but she had already produced the very successful "The Bird in the Tree" (the first Elizabeth Goudge book I ever encountered, and one that instantly won me over).
It's a bit of a cursory canter through the '45, in which Ranald manages by credibility-straining coincidence to turn up at every significant point of the Prince's escape, but it rings true enough. And it helps, I think, that Judith is herself from a Hanoverian family, so the perspective isn't entirely about the romantic Highland clans and their idealism; there's a welcome touch of scepticism that helps avoid the perception that the author is simply serving up a tartan-and-shortbread version of history. It's hard to escape the parallels with D.K. Broster's "The Flight of the Heron" (probably drawing on much the same contemporary sources), but this element of the novel felt well executed to me.
The bit that didn't really work was the 'twist' at the end, where the cause of Judy's nightmares and Judith's self-accusations of betrayal is revealed, and one feels that Broster could have handled that much better. Given that Judith has already given Angus explicit instructions that if necessary he is to "kill the laird" with his own hands in order to save him from the horror of being hung, drawn and quartered, the fact that by her own act she successfully averts that fate --with Ranald's *own* reaction being "You've saved me from them"-- doesn't seem to justify 'the middle window' being a source of horrors forever afterward. (Also it makes no sense to me that the English soldiers completely disappear from that point onward and apparently never come back to discover what happened...)
And it really wouldn't have hurt to give the characters ten minutes or so of snatched intercourse somewhere in the plot to produce the necessary continuing bloodline :-p
The character for whom I felt the most sympathy, unsurprisingly, was Charles, who is basically an echo of Nadine's husband from the Damerosehay novels: a thoroughly decent career soldier who loves Judith, but in an inarticulate way that fails to satisfy her romantic longings. Only Nadine goes back to George Eliot in the end, and Charles simply has to 'do the decent thing' and allow his fiancée to go off with her Designated Soulmate...