Blogger: Michelle Ule
Location: Books & Such Main Office, Santa Rosa, Calif.
As aforementioned, my husband and I became fans of PBS’s Masterpiece Theater early in our marriage. Back in those days, which seem almost Dickenesque now, the program aired once a week on Sunday nights. You saw it then, or you didn’t see it at all.
Fortunately, the program usually featured stories based on actual books, so if you missed an episode, you could obtain a copy of the novel and catch up before the next Sunday. Which is how we happened to read Nevil Shute’s A Town Like Alice--and fell in mutual love with the British author’s stories.
I mean, really, what’s not to like? Writing before, during, and after World War II, Shute penned romantic tales of engineers and the women they loved.
What could be better than that?
It was like looking in a mirror.
Well, maybe not.
We were in the throes of naval submarine life when we started to read Shute, living apart for long periods of time while my husband “fought” the cold war and I handled children and collapsing machinery. Shute gave us a fantasy escape into orderly engineering and loyal women who exemplified courage when the chips were down. Not precisely our life, but close enough in feel and texture that we took pleasure in reading the stories together and dreaming about the future.
Curiously, though, we never touched Shute’s most famous novel, On the Beach–the story of an American submarine in Australia as the world suffered nuclear meltdown. It didn’t appeal, or maybe that one really was too close to home in the 1980s.
Our favorite was Trustee from the Toolroom, the story of a humble tool-and-die maker who traveled around the world to ensure his orphaned niece received her inheritance–at great personal risk to himself. In that novel, I recognized my husband’s character and integrity as well as his engineering competence in spite of great odds.
What about you? Have you ever found a book, series of books, or an author who seemed to understand your life in uncanny ways? (Other than Romeo and Juliet, of course.)
It wasn’t a book, but a movie: Fiddler on the Roof. In the late ’80s and early ’90s, we lived on a Bible translation center in Colombia. We were a tightly-knit, identifiable minority in a sea of the ethnically and religiously different. Due to political unrest, we knew we could be uprooted and deported on short notice. After high school graduation, most of our kids went away, usually to another continent. We loved the life we were leading, but the emotional touch-points to that movie were so strong that we sang its songs at our talent shows, and watched it time-and-again at our movie nights. I can still watch just a few minutes of it and feel myself close to tears.
Oddly enough, in Kristen Heitzmann’s Secrets and Unforgotten I could’ve lived in the protagonist’s (Lance Michelli) skin. He captured my heart both as a the romantic character that he was but mainly my heart as a Christian. It was his passion, his love for Jesus, his desire to do the right thing which sometimes led to the wrong thing–it was me in male form.
Oddly, or not so oddly, I become immersed in the world of almost every writer I read. Russian for Pasternak and very Englis for Jane A.
Have you read Kate Atkinson’s Behind the Scenes at the Museum.
Wonderful about English middle-class life in the 1950’s.
Snowy STILL in NY
Wow, Brian, who would have thought a story, a movie, about families in the Jewish ghetto during the end of the tsar’s reign would resonate with a missionary family in Colombia. Thanks for sharing.
And Elizabeth, I, too, began a life-long love affair with Russia after seeing and then reading Dr. Zhivago.
(Though we’re more like Tevye and Golda than Lara and Yuri).
I’ll look for Atkinson; she sounds something like Barbara Pym.
Perhaps the real question is what makes a story timeless–that we respond emotionally to tales set in places so very different from our current homes?
Love your last question about what makes a story timeless. I think sometimes we respond emotionally to characters BECAUSE their settings are different. When we strip away the dailyness of life, what’s left is the human essence–the things that make us the same despite our differences. That’s where we find the true questions of the human experience, eh?
Hi Michelle:
I found the link to your blog through Savvy Authors. I’m a huge fan of Masterpiece Theatre and BBC costume dramas. I’ve read almost every book Neville Shute wrote. Some of them are so old and tattered that I keep them in plastic sandwich bags. A Town Like Alice is my favorite but I loved The Far Country, Pastoral and The Pied Piper too.
I “identified” with the the protaganist in “Behind the Scenes at the Museum” so much that it was kind of eerie. Loved that book!
Great blog!
Jennifer