I've been on an Anne of Green Gables kick lately, so when I ran out of L. M. Montgomery's Anne books, I decided to read Before Green Gables,
the prequel released in conjunction with the 100th anniversary of the
publication of the original novel. Canadian author Budge Wilson tackles
the tale of Anne's life prior to her life-changing encounter with
Matthew Cuthbert. Based on what Montgomery's Anne had to say about her
early years, I expected a prequel would be pretty grim, and Wilson's
certainly is that. Virtually gone is the humor so characteristic of
Montgomery's stories, and poor Anne has to dig deep to find something to
be happy about in her unpleasant circumstances.
Wilson does a
pretty effective job of populating young Anne's life with a variety of
interesting characters. She first introduces us to Walter and Bertha
Shirley, giving us a solid idea of the love-filled life Anne might have
enjoyed had her parents survived beyond her early infancy. Wilson lets
us peek into the heads of various characters throughout the novel, but
she focuses mostly on Anne, who is resilient and hard-working and whose
imagination keeps her resentment from consuming her.
The
childhood I imagined for Anne was similar to Wilson's in some ways. I
envisioned a lot of hard labor and little love, and that's basically
what Wilson conveys. While neither of Anne's homes is anywhere near as
idyllic as Green Gables, however, Anne doesn't find herself entirely
devoid of affection. On the one hand, she is expected to shoulder an
even heavier burden than I'd guessed, cooking, cleaning and in all other
ways caring for a series of young, unruly children. On the other, each
of her guardians cares about her to some extent, even though they don't
treat her very well, and in each place she finds kindred spirits to
comfort her.
Wilson seems determined not to give us any
cardboard villains. Mrs. Thomas, with whom Anne lives for her first nine
years, served as a housekeeper for the Shirleys, a job that brought her
more happiness than any portion of her marriage to an alcoholic,
unstable husband. She begs him to let her adopt Anne, but when she bears
four children over the next five and a half years, she quickly loses
interest in the orphan girl. Working outside the home, she starts
absurdly early in delegating responsibility to Anne, and she often snaps
at her. Yet occasionally, she treats Anne with kindness, if only
because she reminds her of her parents. Mr. Thomas is a brutish monster
of a man when he is drunk, and his addiction nearly leads the family to
ruin on several occasions. Yet he never mistreats Anne, and in fact, he
comes to quite enjoy conversing with her and trying to get the knack of
her ability to imagine away her problems.
As a fan of the Kevin Sullivan adaptation of Anne of Green Gables,
which begins with Anne still living with the Hammonds before the man of
the house suffers a fatal heart attack, I have always pictured Mrs.
Hammond as middle-aged and exceptionally cross, constantly subjecting
Anne to a barrage of verbal assaults. But Wilson paints Mrs. Hammond as a
young woman in her twenties who is merely overwhelmed. Her husband is
decent and hard-working but basically uninvolved in the raising of his
unwieldy family, which eventually includes eight children, all under the
age of six. Mrs. Hammond never hollers at Anne or knocks her around;
she merely wanders around in a daze, scarcely aware of what is happening
around her and leaving Anne to do the bulk of the child-rearing.
I
have mixed feelings about these semi-sympathetic portrayals of Anne's
guardians. On the one hand, it's nicer to imagine that Anne's childhood
wasn't completely miserable, and one might wonder how someone who
suffered nothing but abject neglect and abuse could turn out so well.
And after all, Anne does tell Marilla that she feels sure her guardians
"meant to be" good to her, even if they didn't quite manage it. But she
also spoke of always being unwanted, and that's not really the case
here; she's too indispensable to be truly unwanted. And there are
several people in her life who genuinely love her.
Eliza, the eldest of the Thomases, is as much a mother to Anne as Anne's daughter Rilla is to the "war baby" Jims in Rilla of Ingleside.
For nearly six years, she tells Anne stories and showers her with love.
Then she marries out of the family and Anne's life. Her next kindred
spirits arrive when the Thomases move to Marysville, where Anne gets her
first schooling. There's the saintly teacher, her sympathetic aunt and a
withdrawn intellectual who learns to live again after befriending Anne.
The frustrating thing about these three is that while they do little
things to cheer Anne up and expand her mind, none of them offer to take
Anne in when Mr. Thomas dies and she is left without a home. Once with
the Hammonds, she bonds with the schoolteacher there, and even the
orphanage teacher takes a shine to her.
I always pictured Anne's
first 11 years as being comparable to Harry Potter's, with no kindred
spirits in sight. But nearly 400 pages of nothing but ill treatment
would make for a rather tedious story, and the novel is enough of a
downer as it is. It could definitely use a dose of Montgomery's humor.
Little Anne doesn't get into any ridiculous messes like Green Gables
does; it's just day after day of dreary diaper-scrubbing,
vegetable-chopping and baby-minding. I imagine Wilson figured she has
enough to deal with already, but I would have loved at least a couple of
laugh-aloud scuffles.
Along those lines, Anne is just a little
too perfect. She speaks in complete sentences at the age of three and
even makes use of metaphors. By the time she's five, she speaks like a
college English major, and she's practically running the household to
boot. It doesn't seem very realistic, and certainly not too consistent
with Montgomery's depictions of five-year-olds. Yes, Anne is an unusual
girl, but Wilson takes it too far. Also inconsistent with Montgomery is
the narrative style, which is fairly stark as opposed to flowery, and
Wilson doesn't make a great deal of effort to align herself with
late-19th century sensibilities, particularly when she has characters
openly discussing biological issues that would never have been broached
by Montgomery.
If you are a fan of the Anne books, Before Green Gables
is an interesting installment. Wilson does a pretty good job of filling
in the gaps in Anne's early life, despite lacking Montgomery's
distinctive style. Was a prequel really necessary? Of course not. But if
you've always wondered about Anne's early years and could use a little
help in imagining them, Wilson's book is worth a look.
No comments:
Post a Comment