Remarkable Creatures: A Novel, Tracy Chevalier

Mary Anning With Her Dog Tray and the Golden Cap Outcrop in the Background, Natural History Museum, London, by an unknown artist, dated before 1842

(July 13) Recommended by Andrea -- she quite liked this author after reading Girl With a Pearl Earring and pursuing all her other work. She really, really liked this book.

I liked this book, too, but my initial enthusiasm for it began to dwindle as I realized it was a fiction based on real-life characters rather than a fiction "just borrowing" from real-life miscellanea. These “recreations” of real people’s lives rarely sit well with me... I'm bothered by the strain to hit all the notes in the historical figure’s Wikipedia page and the pointlessness of imagining “what might have happened” to this real person, which usually involves giving them all kinds of sexual preoccupations (because those are interesting to readers).

If you really are inspired by a real life, just plagiarize it and write a full-blown fiction, fergawdsake. What is the advantage of the half-fake?

On the other hand, there is a bit of a history lesson here -- you learn some history in a palatable way. But when I realize that's the intention, I resent it; it detracts from a book for me. Note to authors: please hide your condescension. At the same time, it is a terrible shame that Mary Anning’s importance was never a proper part of history before now. The book is a redress of an injury.

But, basically, this is like Mistress of Nothing, in that a real life is “imagined” using a lot of “true facts” so that it all seems more credible.

Though Chevalier is a very competent writer, I was disappointed by a few choices in this book. For example, she had a character describing the way So-and-So “peppered the world with” something or other (papers or dogma or such like). I doubt people of the the early 19th century used that expression that way. The same character explains a problem by mentioning the “tensions between” two groups of people. Again, a modern turn of phrase, probably incoherent to a 1824 ear. These two incidents were quite close together and coming from the same character, so maybe that’s part of the issue, but it was a bit jarring -- elsewhere Chevalier tries to mimic an early-19th-century habit of expression. Note to authors: be faithful to the speech patterns of your historical period consistently or be consistently unfaithful, one or the other.

Chevalier also sort of undermined the charm of Jane Austen novels for me by parodying a bit of Anne Elliot and Captain Wentworth from Persuasion.... and then, in case we didn’t get that reference, she fully spells out the possibility that Mary Anning's real life might have been a Jane Austen novel. Because Lyme Regis! Because 1820s!

So, yecch, I felt bit condescended to and lectured at -- over-guided --, and at the same time the discovering-fossils material was enjoyable and made me interested in the real-life person (not unlike The Mistress of Nothing). Grudging respect.