A Change of Climate : A Novel

Rating:
Summary: Jane Austen updated
Review: "A Change of Climate" begins like a Jane Austen comedy of manners: close observation of the social rituals which enable people to not speak the through. Even some of the characters (Ralph's and Anna's parents, for example) seem taken from a 19th century novelistic description of religious fanatics. It is not long, however, before th novel leaves Austen in the dust--and blood. I found the novel to be intellectually stimulating--is it possible to be good?--and profoundly disturbing. I think the novel is perfect for bookclubs. I am looking forward to reading "The Giant O'Brien" and "An Experiment in Love."

Rating:
Summary: Family secrets
Review: Instinctively, people know that when a pain is too great to be endured, it is appropriate to wait until it can be more rationally confronted. But there is always the danger of pushing the pain so far away that it becomes inaccessible, if never, ever forgotten. "To some people great grief is an indecency...They blame the bereaved."

After a stunning tragedy in Africa, where Ralph and Anna Eldred have gone as missionaries, they return home, cautioning their family never to speak of the horror they have endured. It is relegated to the past, where it will stay. The Eldred's are compliant people, particularly Ralph, a man of good intentions who works for the family charitable trust, providing necessities, such as food, clothing and shelter for those less fortunate. But for their brief years in Africa and the trauma they suffer on the Dark Continent, the Eldred's personify the spirit of missionary life.

Once again residing in England providing for the downtrodden, Anna and Ralph live out a self-effacing routine. As a Christian, Ralph believes in service, so compassionate that he cannot turn away from those in need. Covertly, Ralph is concerned that people will mistake him for a man who loves mankind in general, but not persons in particular. However, this is exactly how he is perceived, soldiering on for over twenty years after the tragedy, burying himself in the trivia of everyday obligations. His endless pursuit of virtue in hopes of atonement can never be realized.

Meanwhile, Anna suffers grievously for Ralph's neglect, enduring a constant ache, her own survival defined by the ever-present needs of her four children. Anna has paid a terrible price for her silence all these years. Ralph grows more distant and preoccupied, Anna more edgy and neither expects the emotional eruption when Ralph falls into a romantic entanglement with a local woman.

Mantel is gifted writer, dissecting her character's motivations with elegant precision, especially their great missionary hubris, the vagrant self-congratulatory thoughts that creep into even the most well-meant acts, as the couple seeks to bury the past under the weight of the present. Layer upon layer, the author builds a structure that appears sturdy but ultimately collapses under the weight of grief and silence. Whether the couple recovers will be determined by their spiritual strengths and human weaknesses, the delicate balance between expectations and reality. Luan Gaines/2004.




Rating:
Summary: British Sensibilities
Review: Save your money. Or, if you need to spend it, buy plain yogurt -- you will find the bland white stuff much more exciting than this novel. If you do buy this book, you will wade through pages and pages waiting for the story to get started and then you will not care about a single character you meet. In the course of the book, there are love affairs, savage beatings, and a kidnapping or two, and all these incidents unfold without an ounce of passion, desire, or emotion. Anna, the long suffering wife, is so strangled that she can't bring herself to demand a new washing machine. She and her obtuse husband never talk to each other or to their children. And we are supposed to care about the marriage of these two? Buy yogurt.

Rating:
Summary: We Know These People
Review: This is the first novel of Hilary Mantel that I've read, and I'm eager to read more. Her style is her strength: she is a keen observer of human character, human fraility, human environments, and she describes the environment, emotions and atmospheres with a crystal clarity. For example, her paragraph about the end of a semester caused me to relive those times: "only dogged by that usual feeling of anticlimax the end of exams brings. After this, you think, after my papers are over, I will do, and I will do ... and then you don't. You are a shell, enclosing outworn effort. You expect a sense of freedom, and yet you feel trapped in the same old body, the same drab routines; you expect exhilaration, and you only feel a kind of habitual dullness, a letdown, a perverse longing for the days when you read and made notes and sat up all night."

Mantel's characters are muddlers. They muddle through life with good intentions, but feel displaced and unsatisfied. Yet you care for them, and say to yourself, "I know these people!" There are many robust characters [Ralph and Anna, missionaries in Africa; their children, searching for their place in the world; Ralph's sister Emma] and threads interwoven through the basic story. The main characters are Ralph and Anna, missionaries who go to Africa to "do good". Evil events there haunt their lives when they return to England.

The novel is written as an "entertaining read", in a page-turning style -- you are interested in the characters and events. Yet it is a substantial work, addressing important themes: good versus evil, do our choices make a difference, the cost of cultural misunderrstandings, the loss of faith, how any sense of security is an illusion. While entertaining, Mantel is not afraid of the artist's obligation to tell us unpalatable truths about ourselves.

My one complaint is that the ending was too predictable; I felt that the novel was "wrapped up", rather than allowed to find its own ending.

Rating:
Summary: Buried Secrets, Fine Writing, Brave and Complex Theme
Review: When asked, rhetorically, by his sister, "Whatever happened to the dinosaurs?", Ralph, the main character responds, "Their habitat altered...A change of climate." In his rebellion against his parents, their closed, religiously fundamentalist point of view, and his father's financial blackmailing regarding his career choices, Ralph intentionally changes his physical habitat and his climate by escaping to South Africa with his bride. Working as a lay person at a mission and vigorously opposing apartheid, Ralph and Anna eventually are imprisoned, then banished to Bechuanaland, now Botswana. It is here that the savagery which creates a permanent and terrible climate in their marriage occurs, a savagery not limited to one race as Ralph and Anna had perceived in South Africa. As the story bounces from the present in England back twenty years to Africa, the reader lives through the vivid and terrible African experiences and simultaneously sees how they have permeated the lives of these good, but often naïve, people. Both Ralph and Anna have rejected the traditional religion of their parents in favor of doing good deeds in their family lives and through a social service trust. But as Ralph's uncle James points out, "There is nothing so appallingly hard...as the business of being human." While the reader cheers as James grows and eventually embraces life, s/he also fears for Anna, who remains emotionally closed, despite her good deeds, fearful that she "should lose everything, one of these days." As the events resolve themselves and the "competition in goodness" comes to an end, we see real humans trying to put aside the petrified past and to change the climate of their lives, and we will, perhaps, evaluate our own lives: How human are we? Or are we dinosaurs?

Rating:
Summary: This thoughtful family saga evokes a climate for change.
Review: When asked, rhetorically, by his sister, "Whatever happened to the dinosaurs?", Ralph, the main character responds, "Their habitat altered...A change of climate." In his rebellion against his parents, their closed, religiously fundamentalist point of view, and his father's financial blackmailing regarding his career choices, Ralph intentionally changes his physical habitat and his climate by escaping to South Africa with his bride.

Working as a lay person at a mission and vigorously opposing apartheid, Ralph and Anna eventually are imprisoned, then banished to Bechuanaland, now Botswana. It is here that the savagery which creates a permanent and terrible climate in their marriage occurs, a savagery not limited to one race as Ralph and Anna had perceived in South Africa.

As the story bounces from the present in England back twenty years to Africa, the reader lives through the vivid and terrible African experiences and simultaneously sees how they have permeated the lives of these good, but often naïve, people. Both Ralph and Anna have rejected the traditional religion of their parents in favor of doing good deeds in their family lives and through a social service trust. But as Ralph's uncle James points out, "There is nothing so appallingly hard...as the business of being human."

While the reader cheers as James grows and eventually embraces life, s/he also fears for Anna, who remains emotionally closed, despite her good deeds, fearful that she "should lose everything, one of these days." As the events resolve themselves and the "competition in goodness" comes to an end, we see real humans trying to put aside the petrified past and to change the climate of their lives, and we will, perhaps, evaluate our own lives. Can we accept change, or are we dinosaurs at heart?

Rating:
Summary: British Sensibilities
Review: When asked, rhetorically, by his sister, "Whatever happened to the dinosaurs?", Ralph, the main character responds, "Their habitat altered...A change of climate." In his rebellion against his parents, their closed, religiously fundamentalist point of view, and his father's financial blackmailing regarding his career choices, Ralph intentionally changes his physical habitat and his climate by escaping to South Africa with his bride.

Working as a lay person at a mission and vigorously opposing apartheid, Ralph and Anna eventually are imprisoned, then banished to Bechuanaland, now Botswana. It is here that the savagery which creates a permanent and terrible climate in their marriage occurs, a savagery not limited to one race as Ralph and Anna had perceived in South Africa.

As the story bounces from the present in England back twenty years to Africa, the reader lives through the vivid and terrible African experiences and simultaneously sees how they have permeated the lives of these good, but often naïve, people. Both Ralph and Anna have rejected the traditional religion of their parents in favor of doing good deeds in their family lives and through a social service trust. But as Ralph's uncle James points out, "There is nothing so appallingly hard...as the business of being human."

While the reader cheers as James grows and eventually embraces life, s/he also fears for Anna, who remains emotionally closed, despite her good deeds, fearful that she "should lose everything, one of these days." As the events resolve themselves and the "competition in goodness" comes to an end, we see real humans trying to put aside the petrified past and to change the climate of their lives, and we will, perhaps, evaluate our own lives. Can we accept change, or are we dinosaurs at heart?