A Contrast of Books

At some point there will be some churchy news to post, but for the time being I take refuge in books. While on holiday I managed to complete a hoary old warhorse of the Gothic brigade, Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho. I say 'complete', but the only way I could bear it was skipping through at quite a lick. Novel-readers must have had so much more time in 1794 to follow the minutiae of Emily St Aubert's sleeping habits, or lack of them depending on how menaced she feels by the mysterious and threatening goings-on at Udolpho. The book is, of course, typified by ludicrously anachronistic attitudes (it's set in the 16th century but the characters are all clearly living in the later 1700s) and characterisation so broad-brush it's virtually done with a broom: villain Montoni is so much the silent-movie heavy that you can almost see his bristling brows and painted-on moustache, while Emily spends an awful lot of her time swooning. Various people seem to die for no worse reason than being a bit upset, and when Emily and Valancourt get together their conversation is so neurotic you could begin double-handed slapping the pair of them, and never tire of it. There's more padding than a pantomime dame's bra. Emily escapes from the dreaded castle (for the final, conclusive time) about three-fifths of the way through and after that nothing really happens: Montoni's final defeat occurs deflatingly off-stage, and the famous explanation of the novel's grandest moment of horror is so ridiculous you gape at its audacity. Udolpho really is very, very bad indeed.

Thankfully I could then turn to Jennifer 8 Lee's The Fortune Cookie Chronicles, which I picked up in the second-hand bookstore at Trelissick House: an apparently acclaimed book though I hadn't heard of it. In 2005 the US Powerball lottery experienced a huge spike in winners and only just survived: investigations revealed that the winners had all taken their numbers from fortune-cookie slips bought at Chinese restaurants across the land, numbers which just happened all to come up at once in the lottery draw. Ms Lee, a Chinese-American journalist, was captivated by this story and in the course of investigating it, and how fortune cookies came to be at all (clue: they aren't Chinese), found herself caught up into a gigantic ever-widening spiral of restaurants, immigration experiences, culinary fashions and unexpected wonders. I have no special interest in Chinese food, but Ms Lee's account shines a light into dramatic and unexpected corners, not least how bloody, bloody hard it is to be an immigrant (at least a Chinese immigrant in the US), how likely you are to be poorer than you should be and to die before you should die. I wonder what parallels there are in Britain, not so much for the Chinese (most of whom here have hailed from Hong Kong and so whose journeys have been relatively uncomplicated), but people from other parts of the world. The story is told with a deft, undemonstrative precision that combines personal experience and the techniques of the journalist and the historian in just the right amounts. 

(There is, I suspect, a Gothic novel waiting to be written set around a Chinese restaurant.)