Review - Moll Flanders

Moll Flanders (by Daniel Defoe) was the first book I've had to read for class now I'm at university. This is for my "introduction to the novel" module, and it's considered to be one of the earliest English novels, and is part of the canon as my university sees it. In my opinion, it's not quite there -- Defoe "marketed" it as a true story, and in terms of style or plotting like a novel, there's little. It's just the straight, stream-of-consciousness tale of a woman in the seventeenth century who has loose morals. There are no chapters, the story is entirely linear, and it doesn't follow the same conventions as what we'd now consider a novel.

Which is not to say I don't see where it comes into the canon: it's clearly fictional, and reminds me quite a lot of books like Go Ask Alice, only for the seventeenth century! It's interesting to observe how different things were then: the weird punctuation, random capitalisation and italicisation, the lack of chapter breaks, the lack of speech marks. Very strange to think how much the novel has evolved.

In terms of plot, it's not as shocking as I was expecting it to be given the blurb: "Moll Flanders follows the life of its eponymous heroine through its many vicissitudes which include her early seduction, careers in crime and prostitution, conviction for theft and transportation to the plantations of Virginia", etc. There's not honestly much prostitution, although she has lots of husbands, and the sex stuff is all skipped over quickly. One of the stories within the story is quite weird: the story of how she marries her brother. The theft part doesn't show up until later on, although that isn't half-hearted and a lot of her clever heists are described.

As a character, Moll gets quite a lot of depth; but at the same time, you expect that from a novel of this length that is written entirely in her head! I didn't really feel any emotional connection to her, though, and she didn't feel 'real' to me, really. I found the whole book quite boring and difficult to read. Worth a look, though, if you're interested in early novels. I could probably do a better, fuller review of this after my lecture next week -- heck, I might come back and edit some more interesting stuff in. Right now, though, I need to go off and make notes on the portrayal of women in it, before I forget!

Review - The Song of Roland

I had to read The Song of Roland for medieval lit, mostly because it's an epic of the period, while the other medieval texts are all romances -- I assume that later we'll have to make some comparisons and draw some contrasts. It's interesting to me because of my background with the classical epics -- it reminds me very strongly of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Obviously, they're all oral poems, designed to be memorised and performed, so in terms of language there's a lot of similarity, but there's also a similarity in the heroes -- the honour thing, for example, Roland shares with Achilles: it's better to die with honour than anything else.

I was actually surprised by how much I enjoyed it, really. It's very easy to read, in this translation at least, and though the tense shifts in a way that should be awkward, the flow is quite easy to go along with. The descriptions are very... colourful. Which is to say, I winced at certain parts -- like Roland's brains seeping out of his ears, and Ganelon being torn into pieces.

Another interesting thing for me is the portrayal of the pagans, and the way it's been twisted from real history. The "otherness" of the pagans has been highly emphasised -- although also some of them are shown to be good knights so that they're actually a worthy opponent for Charlemagne and Roland to face.

Very interested to know what more my lecturer has to say about this poem.

(No, I don't have a freaking crush on him. Really!)