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Books: Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary by Pamela Dean
I finally read Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary by Pamela Dean and I had a lovely time reading it and a lovely time journaling about it as I read it, and I'm saving those journal notes here.
The following is very much not a review in any sense. Nor does it contain summary. But it sure does contain a lot of feelings and reactions. And quite a bit of things that are probably spoilers. Notes in [ ] are my own later comments on the notes I took while reading.
First of all, I have a great sense of comfort when reading Pamela Dean because the words are clearly all doing just what she wants them to do.
It is as if she had met up with Humpty Dumpty, perused the arrangement he made with his words, drawn up her own improved contract, and then gone on a varied and successful program of recruitment and employment: all the right words will show up, they will do what she asks and mean what she intends, and she will pay them extra on Saturday. This is tremendously satisfying for me and is, I presume, tremendously satisfying for the words as well.
Second of all, and this follows on from the words but can by no means be presumed on the basis of a good working agreement with words alone: the dialogue.
The characters spend a great deal of time quoting plays in a way that is entirely appropriate to character, theme, and plot, which is delightful in itself and no simple trick to accomplish.
But what is more, and perhaps lovelier, is that their everyday speech, when they are not quoting others, balances one foot on the short of natural dialogue and one foot in the sea. And the sea is, of course, sometimes rhetoric, sometimes poetry, swift and changeable.
The people are made up of stories, and in a story, and also very much people.
The third thing, the craft hat-trick, is that all of this is happening in a novel that plays (more or less, with surface deference and sleight-of-hand) by the rules of naturalistic novel structure. Everything needs to happen in the stitchery of event and character that is a standard narrative point of view and, with elegant folding and deft stitches, it does.
And there are exceptions in the dialog, and this is part of the craft too: that Dominic, in early scenes, never once speaks in natural dialogue: he is all rhyme and no reason, but his unworldliness is masked for the reader by the changeable edges of the other characters' conversation.
In this we instantly suspect that Dominic is of fairyland because his speech is to our speech as the fields of fairyland, in Dunsany's telling, are to our own fields: beyond the fields we know. One hedgerow over. Adjacent and yet not touching.
The fairy elements of the story are established seamlessly in the first few pages. The house next door is built and we know, from the ways that its building are marked and remarked upon, that time and memory are not to be trusted. Of course then Dominic wants to build a time machine.
Laurie Anderson's Strange Angels! And I feel like the album and song are wonderful points of reference, yet I can't actually fairly evaluate this because the particular relevance to me of this song is so weighted by the fact that when I was 13, just exactly Gentian's age, I was studying creative writing at summer camp and the instructor played Laurie Anderson's song about history being an angel being blown backward into the future and Hansel and Gretel. And the song haunted me for decades while I did not remember who had written it or what it was called. So that if I had read this novel when it came out, when I was 19 or 20, I would not have known that Gentian and I had the reference in common... [and here it is relevant that I wrote the first bit of these notes before the lyrics were quoted!]
... oh, but I would have known as soon as we got to the lyrics, and then this song would only have been lost to me for near-seven years and not near-three decades. And wouldn't that have been lovely. And I could have been grateful then for the chance to find something lost as Gentian shared it with someone else.
Oh! But I put the book down and wrote this before I got to the next line where the song that haunts me irritates Gentian. I think that on balance, then, I prefer to have found it again on my own. Perhaps some day I shall hear the rest of the album.
[and here it is relevant that I wrote this above bit before we return to the song in the text. :D]
I'm at the bit now where Erin and Gentian and Becky are having supper together (and I love that it is so clearly supper, not dinner - that precision again) and I love Erin so much.
Erin feels so precisely and generously observed. Like Dominic's racism. Like the BBS and the dial-up, so sharply of the present moment of the story.
The bit where Gentian reflects on her parents naming habits reminded me suddenly and powerfully of The Great Gilly Hopkins. Poor Gilly! There's a book [Gilly Hopkins] where conceits have aged oddly. [Because a character named after Galadriel now would be much less of an outlier than in the 1980s.]
There is something about not studying an eclipse of the moon while you are on the moon that is very like the way the house obstructs the telescope.
I was definitely reading Francesca Lia Block [who the characters reference with the Weetzie Bat books] in high school and I would have found the party reference to Witch Baby vastly reassuring.
And then it turns out I would have come back to Laurie Anderson at the end, to the song that haunted me.
What a strange book. Deep and wild and raw. People are so wildly uncomfortable with the friendship and sexuality of young women, so the shape of this book, fierce and loving and shaped at a younger time [in people's lives] would perhaps never be as beloved as Tam Lin? But it is set in that same continuity and yet Tam Lin is so loved, and I hear about Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary so much less.
The very young age of these girls approached by the devil is terribly true to the ballads. And sexual assault hangs over the book the way the risks of pregnancy did over Tam Lin.
It is by nature a very, very fierce book that is ragingly fierce in ways that roil in the containment of the language.
I am glad to have read it. I don't know if I am glad or sorry not to have read it at 18 or 19, rawly collegiate and [redacted mental health note re 19 year old self]. It might have been a bit much for me in that moment. Or a miracle. But miracles are terribly uncomfortable, aren't they.
[Side note of odd synchronicity] It was entirely unexpected for me that I went to see a production of Twelfth Night, a play woven through a chunk of the novel, just as I began reading Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary, which was particularly strange as I had never read or watched Twelfth Night before. So this was something I was encountering as the characters encountered it.
[Meta note] It must be incredibly difficult to edit this kind of writing. I feel as if everything is so exactingly constructed, that when two points of text meet they are almost tesseracted, and there is a precise landscape of narrative and wordcraft that is connected instantaneously by the point where the text folds together. Moving any point of text around feels as if it would require the recreation of tesseract-folded space.
The following is very much not a review in any sense. Nor does it contain summary. But it sure does contain a lot of feelings and reactions. And quite a bit of things that are probably spoilers. Notes in [ ] are my own later comments on the notes I took while reading.
First of all, I have a great sense of comfort when reading Pamela Dean because the words are clearly all doing just what she wants them to do.
It is as if she had met up with Humpty Dumpty, perused the arrangement he made with his words, drawn up her own improved contract, and then gone on a varied and successful program of recruitment and employment: all the right words will show up, they will do what she asks and mean what she intends, and she will pay them extra on Saturday. This is tremendously satisfying for me and is, I presume, tremendously satisfying for the words as well.
Second of all, and this follows on from the words but can by no means be presumed on the basis of a good working agreement with words alone: the dialogue.
The characters spend a great deal of time quoting plays in a way that is entirely appropriate to character, theme, and plot, which is delightful in itself and no simple trick to accomplish.
But what is more, and perhaps lovelier, is that their everyday speech, when they are not quoting others, balances one foot on the short of natural dialogue and one foot in the sea. And the sea is, of course, sometimes rhetoric, sometimes poetry, swift and changeable.
The people are made up of stories, and in a story, and also very much people.
The third thing, the craft hat-trick, is that all of this is happening in a novel that plays (more or less, with surface deference and sleight-of-hand) by the rules of naturalistic novel structure. Everything needs to happen in the stitchery of event and character that is a standard narrative point of view and, with elegant folding and deft stitches, it does.
And there are exceptions in the dialog, and this is part of the craft too: that Dominic, in early scenes, never once speaks in natural dialogue: he is all rhyme and no reason, but his unworldliness is masked for the reader by the changeable edges of the other characters' conversation.
In this we instantly suspect that Dominic is of fairyland because his speech is to our speech as the fields of fairyland, in Dunsany's telling, are to our own fields: beyond the fields we know. One hedgerow over. Adjacent and yet not touching.
The fairy elements of the story are established seamlessly in the first few pages. The house next door is built and we know, from the ways that its building are marked and remarked upon, that time and memory are not to be trusted. Of course then Dominic wants to build a time machine.
Laurie Anderson's Strange Angels! And I feel like the album and song are wonderful points of reference, yet I can't actually fairly evaluate this because the particular relevance to me of this song is so weighted by the fact that when I was 13, just exactly Gentian's age, I was studying creative writing at summer camp and the instructor played Laurie Anderson's song about history being an angel being blown backward into the future and Hansel and Gretel. And the song haunted me for decades while I did not remember who had written it or what it was called. So that if I had read this novel when it came out, when I was 19 or 20, I would not have known that Gentian and I had the reference in common... [and here it is relevant that I wrote the first bit of these notes before the lyrics were quoted!]
... oh, but I would have known as soon as we got to the lyrics, and then this song would only have been lost to me for near-seven years and not near-three decades. And wouldn't that have been lovely. And I could have been grateful then for the chance to find something lost as Gentian shared it with someone else.
Oh! But I put the book down and wrote this before I got to the next line where the song that haunts me irritates Gentian. I think that on balance, then, I prefer to have found it again on my own. Perhaps some day I shall hear the rest of the album.
[and here it is relevant that I wrote this above bit before we return to the song in the text. :D]
I'm at the bit now where Erin and Gentian and Becky are having supper together (and I love that it is so clearly supper, not dinner - that precision again) and I love Erin so much.
Erin feels so precisely and generously observed. Like Dominic's racism. Like the BBS and the dial-up, so sharply of the present moment of the story.
The bit where Gentian reflects on her parents naming habits reminded me suddenly and powerfully of The Great Gilly Hopkins. Poor Gilly! There's a book [Gilly Hopkins] where conceits have aged oddly. [Because a character named after Galadriel now would be much less of an outlier than in the 1980s.]
There is something about not studying an eclipse of the moon while you are on the moon that is very like the way the house obstructs the telescope.
I was definitely reading Francesca Lia Block [who the characters reference with the Weetzie Bat books] in high school and I would have found the party reference to Witch Baby vastly reassuring.
And then it turns out I would have come back to Laurie Anderson at the end, to the song that haunted me.
What a strange book. Deep and wild and raw. People are so wildly uncomfortable with the friendship and sexuality of young women, so the shape of this book, fierce and loving and shaped at a younger time [in people's lives] would perhaps never be as beloved as Tam Lin? But it is set in that same continuity and yet Tam Lin is so loved, and I hear about Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary so much less.
The very young age of these girls approached by the devil is terribly true to the ballads. And sexual assault hangs over the book the way the risks of pregnancy did over Tam Lin.
It is by nature a very, very fierce book that is ragingly fierce in ways that roil in the containment of the language.
I am glad to have read it. I don't know if I am glad or sorry not to have read it at 18 or 19, rawly collegiate and [redacted mental health note re 19 year old self]. It might have been a bit much for me in that moment. Or a miracle. But miracles are terribly uncomfortable, aren't they.
[Side note of odd synchronicity] It was entirely unexpected for me that I went to see a production of Twelfth Night, a play woven through a chunk of the novel, just as I began reading Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary, which was particularly strange as I had never read or watched Twelfth Night before. So this was something I was encountering as the characters encountered it.
[Meta note] It must be incredibly difficult to edit this kind of writing. I feel as if everything is so exactingly constructed, that when two points of text meet they are almost tesseracted, and there is a precise landscape of narrative and wordcraft that is connected instantaneously by the point where the text folds together. Moving any point of text around feels as if it would require the recreation of tesseract-folded space.