The Mysteries of Udolpho

I wasn’t looking forward to reading The Mysteries of Udolpho much.  I read a few extracts of it at university and studied another of Ann Radcliffe’s works, The Italian.  She’s one of those authors who use a hell of a lot of words to say very little of any meaning.  I mean, The Mysteries of Udolpho is just shy of 900 pages and yet the plot summary on Wikipedia is two paragraphs long.  One phrase, “many frightening but coincidental events happen within the castle,” sums up a good eighty per cent of the plot.  I have to confess, my enjoyment of the book hinged largely on the fact that I just started speed reading any time Radcliffe got started on the adjectives.  Or the poetry.  Yes, there are poems and they read like school girl fan fiction of the Lyrical Ballads.  For the sake of my sanity, they’ll not be mentioned again.  This, in case you haven’t guessed it yet, is going to be another of those blogs where I bitch but include a disclaimer that I didn’t hate the book.  In fact, in places I quite enjoyed it…

One thing that really annoyed me throughout the novel was Emily.  She’s the main character.  I think had I been reading this book eight or nine years ago, I’d have an entirely different view of her.  She’s young and she’s immature.  But we’re forced into her company for 800-odd pages and she’s not the sort of character who flourishes in adversity.  Once she discovers that life isn’t butterflies and rainbows, she’s whisked off to the creepy Castle of Udolpho by her indifferent aunt and fairly sketchy uncle.  The problem is that she holds an utterly unreasonable view of her uncle.  In her mind, she turns him into an evil villain capable of multiple murders and any crime that strikes her fancy.  Time and time again she is shown to be over-reacting, but still cannot see any good in the man whose only act of violence in the entire book is committed defending her.  The third person narrator doesn’t help matters, taking her flights of fancy seriously.  Sometimes it feels a bit like Harry Enfield’s Kevin the Teenager, accusing his parents of being “so unfair” but without a common sense viewpoint to highlight its ridiculousness.  And okay, Montoni does slightly imprison Emily (with the wonderfully cheesy line, “You speak like a heroine… we shall see whether you can suffer like one,”) and try and steal all her wealth but she could face adversity with a bit more grace.

Another issue I had was down to the fact that I have studied Radcliffe.  I remember being taught that she and Matthew Lewis are the polar opposites of one another.  While Lewis is off telling tales of men accidentally seducing ghost nuns, with Radcliffe everything has a natural explanation.  There are no ghosts.  There are no demons.  Knowing this also means there is little suspense in her work.  She loves to half tell a story, leaving you wanting more only to reveal hundreds of pages later that the resolution that you’ve been craving is utterly trite.  So going in knowing that it’ll be trite does cure you the inevitable disappointment, but also the hunger.  The book should be a real page turner and I just didn’t find it so. 

There are proper positives that I’m taking from The Mysteries of Udolpho though.  First off, it’s made me really want to read Northanger Abbey again.  I remember enjoying it before, but now I’ve read the actual book it’s ripping on and not just a general glut of the genre, I’m sure I’d appreciate it more.  It’s a good read in parts.  It is very much a genre piece and it has the foibles of any genre work.  It’s stupid and cheesy in parts and so ridiculously improbable that you wonder why Radcliffe didn’t just throw a ghost in there anyway for all the likelihood of the actual plot.  But it has its wickedly atmospheric moments, Emily’s discovery of her aunt significantly less murdered than she feared but dying terribly nonetheless is a particular treat.

I’ve just started The Black Prince by Iris Murdoch.  So far, so good.