Performer on the Royal Mile by Tom Brogan is CC BY-ND 2.0
I haven't yet gotten around to reading Joanna Trollope's version of Sense and Sensibility, but I rushed right out and got a copy of Val McDermid's Northanger Abbey as soon as I read Jo Baker's review in the New York Times. McDermid's Northanger Abbey is the second installment in Harper Collins's Austen Project, and it is soon to be followed by Curtis Sittenfeld's Pride and Prejudice and Alexander McCall Smith's Emma. (Full disclosure: I'm not a big Alexander McCall Smith fan, so I'm not in a big rush for that one to come out.)
There has been no shortage of reimaginings of Austen's works in recent years, and Harper Collins's series is up against the brilliant Lizzie Bennet Diaries and Emma Approved by Pemberley Digital, as well as Jo Baker's Longbourn (which I reviewed in an earlier post). In the rush to remake all things Austen, Northanger Abbey is the novel that has gotten relatively little attention, however. As Val McDermid explains in the Huffington Post, updating Northanger Abbey is complicated because its satire on Gothic fiction requires more decoding for modern readers than the love plots of her other novels. I'm not sure that I agree about that, but it is certainly true that Northanger Abbey hasn't been re-made as relentlessly as the other novels. For that reason alone, McDermid's novel is particularly welcome.
I thoroughly enjoyed the first half of McDermid's version. Her decision to move Catherine's (or Cat's) trip from Bath to the Edinburgh Book Festival is an excellent one, and the venue aptly evokes the atmosphere of Austen's crowded scenes of pleasure seekers hoping to see and be seen. Even apart from the connection to Austen's novel, the sequences in Edinburgh work in McDermid's Northanger Abbey as Cat comes under the sway of Isabella Thorpe, barely conceals her disgust at the obnoxious Johnny Thorpe, and becomes enamored of Henry Tilney - facebooking, texting, selfie-taking, and tweeting along the way. Edinburgh in August is the perfect destination for Cat's trip with the Allens, and it's easy to understand why she gets swept up in the excitement.
When the action moves to Northanger Abbey itself, however, it slows down and becomes somewhat less engrossing. There are two reasons for this: 1) often seen from afar in the crowds of Edinburgh, Henry Tilney is understandable as a distant figure. However, once they're staying the same house, Tilney remains friendly, but there doesn't seem to be any actual chemistry between the two of them. 2) The Gothic storyline doesn't work as well as the fast-paced excitement of the sequences in Edinburgh.
Superficially, drawing a Gothic parallel to the Twilight series should work perfectly because of its overwrought romance and the evolving conventions of the vampire myth. In McDermid's novel, however, the Gothic elements somehow aren't believable and feel tacked on. Whenever Cat looks at General Tilney or Henry and wonders if they're vampires, it doesn't feel credible. It doesn't help that the fictive horror series that she's addicted to - the Hebridean Harpies - reminds me of the campy grade-school series American Chillers that my son used to really like.
I know, I know. Cat's belief in General Tilney as Gothic villain is supposed to be absurd. In Austen's novel, Catherine's determination to find horror is the object of satire, and the entire point is that she has no actual basis for her fantasies about the General.
The difference, though, is that Austen is able to sell Catherine's fantasy to us so that we both laugh at her silliness and understand its appeal. If you don't believe me, re-read the scene where Catherine investigates the black cabinet in the middle of a rainstorm (chapter 21). Catherine's anxiety is palpable, and Austen's prose evokes just the right atmoshere, even while she makes sure that we don't forget just how much Catherine longs to find a mystery just like this one. McDermid's novel, while enjoyable, doesn't work quite the same magic.
Nevertheless, McDermid's Northanger Abbey is worth reading - especially for the first half.
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