Kilmeny of the Orchard

Kilmeny had been, she knew not where,

And Kilmeny had seen what she could not declare;

Kilmeny had been where the cock never crew,

Where the rain never fell, and the wind never blew.

That's the only bit I can ever remember from James Hogg's spooky poem 'Kilmeny', but I've always loved its haunting quality. So when I learned that LM Montgomery, author of the wonderful Anne of Green Gables, had written a book titled Kilmeny of the Orchard, I was interested, and thought it would be an ideal choice for the Canadian Book Challenge. This was earmarked for my September contribution, but although I read it last month I'm behind with posts, as I explained earlier in the week, and there will be two Canadian reads during October so I can catch up.

Anyway, I digress. Nan, at Letters From a Hill Farm, really rated this, but I'm not so enthusiastic. Bits of it were delightful, and Montgomery is excellent on descriptions of scenery and wildlife, but overall it really, really irritated me. Our heroine, the beautiful and virtuous Kilmeny is just too perfect, and lacks the appeal of Anne Shirley. I always find Anne very endearing and human, but Kilmeny is neither. The novel also lacks the humour of Anne of Green Gables – not that every novel needs to be funny, but the occasional laugh would have levened the mix in this one.

But what annoyed me most was the notion that that beautiful people are good and clever, and that foreigners are somehow not quite right, and a are 'low' and not to be trusted. I know theories like this were widespread when the novel was published in 1910, but I thought they were distasteful in the extreme, and there are other novelists writing at the same time who didn't express such views.

And I found the hero's obsession with naive, childlike Kilmeny, and his assertion that he will teach her everything she needs to know was more than a little disturbing.

Possibly, at this point I should try and give you a brief synopsis of the book, otherwise my comments will make no sense whatsoever. So, here goes. Eric Marshall has just graduated from college, but has no need to work because he is heir to a fortune and will work in his father's department store. However, he agrees to help a sick friend by temporarily taking over as schoolmaster to a small community on Prince Edward's Island. In the beautiful woods he catches a glimpse of a beautiful young maiden playing beautiful music on her violin. She is Kilmeny, who is an orphan and is very beautiful – oh, sorry, I have already mentioned that, but Eric can only ever love a beautiful woman (shallow bastard). Anyway, she cannot speak, but communicates most ably (and beautifully) by writing lengthy messages incredibly quickly. Brought up by her dour uncle and aunt, who are brother and sister, Kilmeny has never been to school, and never mixes with people.

She's a mysterious figure with a tragic back story dating back to the months before her birth – for her father discovers his first wife is not dead, as he thought, but very much alive, and Kilmeny's goes mad. Well, maybe I exaggerate. She has some kind of breakdown and becomes very peculiar indeed.

Eric, who is terribly good looking, and clever, and everything that is right and honorable, has clandestine meetings with with Kilmeny because he loves her and she loves him. But there is a fly in the ointment...

Before our upright hero can tell Kilmeny's guardians he has been meeting their niece in secret, and ask for her hand in marriage, Neil, the son of Italian pedlars who has been brought up by the aunt and uncle (his mother died and his father ran away) tells on them because he is love with Kilmeny (are you still with me?). I felt sorry for Neil, who is portrayed as 'sullen' and 'low', a thoroughly bad lot, because of his Italian heritage!

Kilmeny won't marry Eric because she can't speak, and Eric's friend, a brilliant doctor, believes her muteness is caused by some kind of psychological disorder, and she may speak if she is shocked into it.

All ends happily, of course, so there you have it it, a sweet, charming, romantic fairy tale – only I don't think it is really. None of the characters really came to life, and Kilmeny and Eric are so beautiful and perfect and good that it's positively sickening.

And, as I said before, it's idealogically unsound, even if some of ideas were prevalent at the time, and there is stuff about children paying for the sins of their parents which also annoyed me, and it's chock full of that rather cloying sentimentality which was so popular with Victorian and Edwardian readers (but not with me). 

By the way, downloaded this from Project Gutenberg, and read it on the Kindle, which is not an attractive image, so I've used pictures of book coves to brighten things up a little! And I should mention that Montgomery quotes quite extensively from the poem, and if you want to read it you'll find it here.

A Tale of WW2 That Will Break Your Heart

If you're the kind of person who cries over books, make sure you've got a large hanky ready and waiting when you read Alison Pick's Far To Go, because it's beautifully written, totally gripping – and very, very sad. Set in Czechoslovakia in the final few months before the outbreak of the Second World War, it describes how the comfortable life of a wealthy Jewish couple begins to fall apart under the growing threat of Nazism, and how they secure their young son's safety by bribing a place for him on one of the trains which took children to foster families in Britain. The story of the Kindertransport is now forgotten by many, but it followed in the wake of Chamberlain's triumphant 'Peace for our time' speech, made after Britain agreed that Hitler could take over the part of Czechoslovakia known as Sudetenland. It's against this background that Pick's novel is played out, and consequently we are aware, as she herself tells us, that this cannot be a happy story, and there can be no happy ending, for we know the outcome, and history cannot be changed, however terrible it may be.

'Far To Go' is inspired, in part, by the experiences of the author's grandparents, but is not biographical. The tale unfurls through letters, lists, official notes and straight narrative, introducing us to factory owner Pavel Bauer, his wife Anneliese, their son Pepik, who is six years old, and his non-Jewish nanny, Marta, and it is through her eyes that we see much of the action. Bit by bit public feeling against the Jews is cranked up into a frenzied hysteria, some of it so seemingly silly that you wonder, just as Marta does, how people were ever persuaded to believe such nonsense. But believe it they did, and Marta watches in horror as a gang of young Nazi thugs kill an old man, and is distraught when Pepik is forced to sit on his own in school, and can no longer play with other children.

Gradually new rules prevent the Jews leading anything like a normal life, and when Pavel is no longer allowed inside his own factory, the Bauers flee to Prague, but there will be no escape, despite their forlorn hope that this terror is only temporary, and that something will happen to halt Hitler. The Bauers, urbane, sophisticated, educated and cultured are secular Jews, who do not follow their faith but, strangely perhaps, persecution gives Pavel a clearer sense of his cultural and religious heritage, and he is determined that his son will know about Judaism. His wife, however, sees things differently. She wants to survive, and even has little Pepik baptised by a Christian priest, in the hopes that it may protect him from what is to come. 

Marta herself grows in understanding as the novel progresses, ending her affair with Nazi Ernst (who works in Pavel's factory, and has been a long-standing friend with his boss) to throw in her lot with the Bauers, who have given her the only happy home she has known.

Alison Pick, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Set against the events of the 1930s is the story told by a Canadian academic, who works with the children – now grown to adulthood – who escaped on the Kindertransport, recording their lives, and how they were affected by the past, by separation from their families, and by survival when so many others died. The time shift, coupled with the variation of style between narrative and letters, does mean the novel jumps around a little, but I thought it worked well in this particular context, as the link between past and present is revealed.

And there are themes which which link past and present, with the motif of a train running through the novel taking us on a journey of discovery. There is the toy train which the child Pepik loves so much, and the train the family cannot board because their attempted escape has been betrayed. Then there is the train that takes Pepik to his new life, swallowing him and his old life in a disturbingly sinister way.

The train was long and black, and entering it was like being swallowed by a snake. The snake had dislocated its jaw to take Pepik in, and now he was being worked down deep into its body, deep to the tip of its tail. Pepik made a little slithering motion; he put his hands on his stomach and imagined the way the snake felt, all the little bodies tumbling around inside it. There were so many children. His eyelashes were wet but he blinked and swallowed, swallowing himself, letting himself be swallowed.

Then there's the way the Canadian academic (you'll have to read the book to find out more) describes memory.

The train of memory sleeps on its tracks. At night, in the station, the shadows gather round it, reaching out to touch its cool black sides. The train stretches back, far out of eyesight. Where it comes from is anyone's guess.

Reading this through I see that as usual, there are all sorts of things I haven't mentioned, like the emotions felt by the characters: love, fear, confusion, hope and the betrayal of trust between people on a national as well as a personal level. The passing of the years does nothing to lessen the impact of the horrendous treatment meted out to the Jews by the Nazis, and this novel personalises one aspect of what happened, taking an imaginary family as the central point, and ascribing to them things that really did happen.

I read this as part of the Canadian Book Challenge (Pick is a Canadian author) and I really enjoyed it, even though it was so heartbreakingly sad. Pick was a new author for me, and I was interested to read the copious notes explaining how the story came about, and giving details about her own family, her discovery of her Czech-Jewish background, and her conversion to Judaism. However, I'm not sure whether quite so much information was really necessary.