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A review by fictionfan
Jane Steele by Lyndsay Faye
Did not finish book.
Dear reader, she murders the English language...
Young Jane Steele's favourite book is Jane Eyre and she sees some parallels between her own life and her heroine's. Not yet an orphan when we first meet her, the suicide of her drug-addled mother soon allows her to achieve that status. Jane has been led to believe that Highgate House should be hers, left to her by her father. But her aunt is living there now and shows no intention of giving it up. And her cousin Edwin is a nasty piece of work who is sexually harassing her. So she kills him. Then she goes off to a school chosen by her wicked and now grieving aunt – a school much like Dickens' Dotheboys Hall, but with added sexual harassment. While there, she kills a man, but he deserves it, so that's okay. Then she goes off to London, where she meets with all kinds of men practising different forms of abuse or sexual harassment, so she kills them.
I'm afraid I just don't get what it is that other people are liking about this book. It's a simple stream of man-hate – if the genders were reversed I'm pretty sure there would be howls of outrage from some of the same people who are praising it. Every man who appears (up to the 44% mark when I abandoned it with huge relief) is some kind of sexual predator, paedophile or wife-beater, and it is therefore shown as amusing, even admirable, that they should be murdered. It's supposed to be funny, I think, but the humour wears very thin after the same premise is used several times – man appears, man abuses girl/woman, man is murdered.
But assuming that for some reason our society is okay with denigrating men on a wholesale basis, that still wouldn't excuse the writing. If pastiching or referencing a great writer, then one has to be able to reproduce or equal that writer's style – comparisons should and will be drawn, especially if large extracts of the original, skilled writer's work are used to head up each chapter. The language in this has no feeling of authenticity, no elegance of style, is sprinkled with anachronistic phraseology and occasional Americanisms, and frequently contains words that are incorrect in the context or, indeed, just plain wrong. Would people put up with a professional pianist who kept hitting the wrong notes? Or a surgeon who removed the wrong organs? Then I simply don't understand why readers are willing to put up with professional authors who use the wrong words. A couple of examples...
On the subject of her cousin Edwin, Jane muses: “Kin, kin, kin was ever his anthem: as if we were more than related, as if we were kindred.” I remain baffled as to what Faye thinks kindred means.
“Never having studied Latin previous, I congratulated myself when at the end of the hour, I was explaining the lesson to the perplexed circumference, and Miss Werwick forgot herself far enough to frown at this development.” I'm going to ignore “previous” because I think Faye's using this incorrectly deliberately to try to give some kind of sense of outdated language. But perplexed circumference? I assume she means circle. Perhaps she thinks that because circles have circumferences then the words can be used interchangeably. Like milk and carton, perhaps, or chocolate and box.
I did think there was a certain irony to Faye introducing a character (an abusive male, obviously) whose major characteristic was his supposedly humorous incorrect use of words. Dickens can do that, because he is skilled with language. Unfortunately, here, it became difficult to differentiate between the character's errors and the author's. It's odd, because in the only other book of Faye's that I've read, her début in fact, I thought her writing was much better than in this. Perhaps it's because she's trying to emulate an outdated style of English English that doesn't come naturally to her and is just not getting it quite right. I'm sure I wouldn't get 19th century New York English right either (but then I wouldn't publish a book written in it if I couldn't). However, given that the book has accumulated an astonishing number of 5-star reviews, it appears that the reading world doesn't share my dislike for either misandry or poor writing. But I fear I can only recommend it to people who hate men and don't mind having to guess what words the author meant to use...
NB This book was provided for review by the publisher, Headline.
www.fictionfanblog.wordpress.com
Young Jane Steele's favourite book is Jane Eyre and she sees some parallels between her own life and her heroine's. Not yet an orphan when we first meet her, the suicide of her drug-addled mother soon allows her to achieve that status. Jane has been led to believe that Highgate House should be hers, left to her by her father. But her aunt is living there now and shows no intention of giving it up. And her cousin Edwin is a nasty piece of work who is sexually harassing her. So she kills him. Then she goes off to a school chosen by her wicked and now grieving aunt – a school much like Dickens' Dotheboys Hall, but with added sexual harassment. While there, she kills a man, but he deserves it, so that's okay. Then she goes off to London, where she meets with all kinds of men practising different forms of abuse or sexual harassment, so she kills them.
I'm afraid I just don't get what it is that other people are liking about this book. It's a simple stream of man-hate – if the genders were reversed I'm pretty sure there would be howls of outrage from some of the same people who are praising it. Every man who appears (up to the 44% mark when I abandoned it with huge relief) is some kind of sexual predator, paedophile or wife-beater, and it is therefore shown as amusing, even admirable, that they should be murdered. It's supposed to be funny, I think, but the humour wears very thin after the same premise is used several times – man appears, man abuses girl/woman, man is murdered.
But assuming that for some reason our society is okay with denigrating men on a wholesale basis, that still wouldn't excuse the writing. If pastiching or referencing a great writer, then one has to be able to reproduce or equal that writer's style – comparisons should and will be drawn, especially if large extracts of the original, skilled writer's work are used to head up each chapter. The language in this has no feeling of authenticity, no elegance of style, is sprinkled with anachronistic phraseology and occasional Americanisms, and frequently contains words that are incorrect in the context or, indeed, just plain wrong. Would people put up with a professional pianist who kept hitting the wrong notes? Or a surgeon who removed the wrong organs? Then I simply don't understand why readers are willing to put up with professional authors who use the wrong words. A couple of examples...
On the subject of her cousin Edwin, Jane muses: “Kin, kin, kin was ever his anthem: as if we were more than related, as if we were kindred.” I remain baffled as to what Faye thinks kindred means.
“Never having studied Latin previous, I congratulated myself when at the end of the hour, I was explaining the lesson to the perplexed circumference, and Miss Werwick forgot herself far enough to frown at this development.” I'm going to ignore “previous” because I think Faye's using this incorrectly deliberately to try to give some kind of sense of outdated language. But perplexed circumference? I assume she means circle. Perhaps she thinks that because circles have circumferences then the words can be used interchangeably. Like milk and carton, perhaps, or chocolate and box.
I did think there was a certain irony to Faye introducing a character (an abusive male, obviously) whose major characteristic was his supposedly humorous incorrect use of words. Dickens can do that, because he is skilled with language. Unfortunately, here, it became difficult to differentiate between the character's errors and the author's. It's odd, because in the only other book of Faye's that I've read, her début in fact, I thought her writing was much better than in this. Perhaps it's because she's trying to emulate an outdated style of English English that doesn't come naturally to her and is just not getting it quite right. I'm sure I wouldn't get 19th century New York English right either (but then I wouldn't publish a book written in it if I couldn't). However, given that the book has accumulated an astonishing number of 5-star reviews, it appears that the reading world doesn't share my dislike for either misandry or poor writing. But I fear I can only recommend it to people who hate men and don't mind having to guess what words the author meant to use...
NB This book was provided for review by the publisher, Headline.
www.fictionfanblog.wordpress.com