Tea at Trianon: On Loss-of-Innocence Narratives

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Wednesday, August 30, 2023

On Loss-of-Innocence Narratives

From Crime Reads:

The appeal of loss-of-innocence narratives lies, I think, in the way they invite us to experience a character’s seismic changes as they unfold—and in the way they can call up in vivid detail our own pasts. I suspect it was inevitable I would write a novel like Pet, that takes as its jumping-off point a deeply charismatic, glamorous woman who taught at my Catholic school. Every girl in my class wanted to be her, and every girl wanted to be her pet. This larger-than-life figure stayed with me for decades, and my memories of the intensity of our feelings around her sparked my story of manipulation and betrayal narrated by 12-year-old Justine.

Child narrators can be tricky to get right, but every syllable of Kit de Waal’s debut My Name is Leon feels authentic. The novel tells the story of a biracial boy growing up in 1980s Britain—Action Man is in the toy shops, The Dukes of Hazzard is on TV, and Margaret Thatcher is in power. When Leon’s brother Jake is born, their mother Carol struggles to care for her sons; in the grip of post-natal depression, she succumbs to her own demons. As a result, Leon and Jake enter the foster care system, where Jake is quickly adopted—because he is an infant and because he is white. Leon, left to face a harsher reality, becomes acutely aware of the racial disparities around him. His foster mother is affectionate, but he cannot help overhearing the conversations she has with her sister: there’s no chance a family will want to adopt him. Some of the most moving passages in the book centre around Leon’s love for his baby brother. He imagines that ‘someone else is holding Jake and kissing him. Someone else is looking into the perfect blue of his perfect eyes. Someone else is smelling him and touching the soft skin on the back of his hand.’ We feel his aching sense of loss; we long for him to be reunited with Jake. De Waal’s Leon is a stunning act of ventriloquism, bringing him to authentic three-dimensional life without ever veering into sentimentality. This book broke my heart and mended it again.

Kirsty Gunn’s debut Rain also features a superbly evoked child narrator. Twelve-year-old Janey spends summer with her family at the lake, passing ‘endless bright days of watery green’ with her little brother while their parents drink and their marriage cracks. Water suffuses this taut, luminous work, beginning with the title and leaking out to chill every page. The lush, claustrophobic descriptions of landscape—‘you were surrounded so closely by growth that you could have felt stifled by it, the way it pushed in on you, surrounded you with its dark odours’—take form alongside a mounting unease that permeates the story. When the shattering crisis comes, we know it will haunt Janey forever. It’s easy to see why Gunn’s dreamlike, poetic masterpiece heralded a major new talent. She brings an outstanding lightness of touch to this dark narrative of guilt, sacrifice, and mistakes that can’t be undone. (Read more.)