Anne's House of Dreams (L.M. Montgomery)

Genre: Period fiction (takes place around 1890 in Canada)
Year Published: 1917

Upon completing the latest book in the Anne of Green Gables sequence, my first impulse was to look up L.M. Montgomery on Wikipedia to ascertain, as I thought was clear, that she had actually written this book -- which covers the first two years of Anne's marriage -- before she herself had gotten married or had children. However, I was wrong; while Montgomery's first two Anne books were written while she was single, she'd already married and had all three of her children by the time Anne's House of Dreams was published.

Why did this surprise me? Well, because this book reads like it was written by someone who had no concept of marriage. Montgomery goes out of her way to avoid writing any scenes in which Anne and her husband Gilbert are just . . . being married people. I'm not talking about sex, I mean you never see them just sitting and enjoying each other's company; you never seem them co-parenting the little boy they have by the end of the novel; you never see them making any decisions together. On the last count, there are a handful of decisions that are made throughout the book, but Gilbert makes up his mind and informs Anne afterwards -- sometimes she struggles against him a bit, but always capitulates in the end.

If that doesn't sound quite like the kind of husband Gilbert Blythe would make, or the kind of wife Anne Shirley would be, you're not alone in that opinion. I know that my discomfort springs mostly from my feminist, twenty-first century ideals, but it also comes partly from knowing these characters as well as a reader can.

So if the book isn't really about Anne and Gilbert's marriage, what is it about? Well, disregarding entirely the "show, don't tell" maxim of fiction, Montgomery allows her book to be dominated by the dialogue of two boilerplate characters, Miss Cornelia Bryant and Captain Jim Boyd. Miss Cornelia blames men for everything, and Captain Jim is a good-hearted hero. That's about all you need to know about them, as they're never really fleshed out beyond that. (One other character, Mrs. Leslie Moore, rounds out the cast -- more about her later.) From the amount of visiting each other Anne, Miss Cornelia, and Captain Jim do, you'd think they literally had nothing else to do. Wasn't life in the Victorian period complicated? They had to make and mend their own clothes, make all their food, write long letters . . . I find it hard to believe they could stand around jawing all day. And yet the book relies almost entirely on dialogue, with the occasional descriptive passage about the beauty of their little seaside town.

The aforementioned Mrs. Moore forms the requisite "fixer-upper" plot of the Anne series, and once again, it just screams deus ex machina. Montgomery's problem on this score is simply that she likes her main characters and will simply not allow them to do anything she might consider immoral or unethical. So while there would have been an intellectually honest, relatively true-to-life way to resolve Mrs. Moore's B-plot, Montgomery shunts this solution aside so Mrs. Moore can remain utterly blameless, a virtuous model of womanhood. Instead, Montgomery invents a ridiculous "out" for Mrs. Moore, all the while having her characters explain that it's "it wasn't one of those [occurrences] you read of in novels." If you need to have your characters say that, you're in trouble.

Recommended? No. So far, the only Anne books I can recommend are the first three. I'll read all of them in their turn and let you all know if any others are worth salvaging.