Heartless by H. G. Parry

Posted on August 23, 2024 by pagesofjulia

From memory, I’m going to say the Peter Pan story was sweet and heartwarming, with some good healthy ideas in it about always retaining a lovably childlike (not childish!) spirit and the magic of believing. We fly through the stars and have adventures! We help each other. And even when we have to (sigh) grow up, we can access that magic again through the power of imagination.

Then there was the movie Hook, which had Robin Williams and was therefore great, and (again in my possibly faulty memory) more or less followed those themes. We all have to grow up, but it wouldn’t be healthy to lose all the joy of childhood.

This is not that version of Peter Pan.

H.G. Parry, who I fell for hard with The Magician’s Daughter, takes us on a more realistic and darker journey with Heartless. Now the protagonist is neither a Darling nor a Lost Boy nor Peter himself, but an orphaned child in a Dickensian sort of London named James, who gives himself the fanciful last name Hook when he gets a chance at self-invention. James is a born storyteller, a skill which endears him to the only boy at the orphanage James really cares about, a careless but compelling child named Peter. For Peter, James tells stories: ones his mother told him or read him, ones he’s read himself, ones he’s made up. For Peter he makes up the child-king Peter Pan and his sometimes-antagonist the pirate Captain Hook, who inhabit a magical (and made up) island called Neverland. These tales keep Peter at James’s bedside until the night that Peter leaps off the orphanage’s high roof and flies into the stars: “second to the right, and straight on till morning.” James wants to follow his best and only friend, the boy who did not so much as look back. But when James leaps, he falls to the stone courtyard below.

From here we follow James Hook (his new identity) and his friend Gwendolen Darling (who takes the identity of James’s younger brother, George Hook) in their adulthood. James is forever chasing after Peter. He will eventually find what he’s looking for and find also that it’s not what he was looking for at all. This brief book (141 pages) is Peter Pan, yes, but retold with a different protagonist at its sympathetic center and a decidedly sinister twist; fairies are not sweet but uncaring. Captain Hook, of all people, is the one we feel for. And we are centered on the power not only of imagination but of storytelling – and like all of them, this is a power that can be used for good or ill. “[The fairies] didn’t understand that stories weren’t meant to be lived in forever; they were meant to be shared, passed on, questioned, to mingle with a thousand other tales and poems and experiences and be changed by them. They didn’t understand that stories, too, needed to grow. He hadn’t understood himself until recently.”

A retelling of a classic with rather more realism (especially in the London setting) and more darkness, but also still sweet and wholesome, with Parry’s absolutely lovely style; I’m going back for more from her.

Rating: 8 leaves.

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The Great Night by Chris Adrian

Posted on May 30, 2011 by pagesofjulia

This book is billed as a modern-day retelling of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which sounds fairly ambitious. The original classic is far too much to mess around with lightly. I find it beautiful, haunting, magical, and surprisingly accessible; I think anyone and everyone should be able to enjoy a production of this play, which might not be true of all the bard’s work, no matter how wonderful. But I have to give Adrian full credit: I feel that he created something new out of it, definitely a recognizable retelling, but something new and beautiful in its own way, very different and very wonderful too.

Three young people, Henry, Will, and Molly, are all (separately) lost in Buena Vista Park in San Francisco at dusk on midsummer night’s eve. All three were on their way to the same party which none really wanted to attend; all three are tenuously connected without actually knowing one another; and all three are quite neurotic in their own ways. Meanwhile, Titania is grief-stricken, having lost her Boy to leukemia (and being unfamiliar with the mortal concept of death), and then having lost Oberon, who left her when they quarreled in their shared grief. In despair and resignation, she releases Puck from his bond of servitude, and he rages as the Beast throughout the park. Also meanwhile, a troupe of homeless aspiring actors meet to rehearse a musical play, but are separated, as the fairies come out to frolic, or flee Puck, or make mischief.

Chapter by chapter we get inside the heads of the three mortal lovers, and sometimes of Titania too. The character development is exquisite; I loved learning more about the histories of Will, Molly, and Henry, and gradually putting together the clues and learning how they’re interconnected and where their respective neuroses might have come from. The depth of these complex, nuanced, disturbed characters might have been my most favorite part of this book.

Titania gets substantially more development, too. The lengthened and deepened relationship with the Boy, and his battle with cancer, allow for her to mature and look outside herself in ways that a fairy queen would not normally be called to do. Even Puck gets a more significant personality, and desires of his own.

Part fairy tale – of course – The Great Night has all the magic and all the lavish scenery that Shakespeare’s Titania & Oberon could have wanted, helped along by the alternately lush & misty San Francisco parkland. As in the play, there are disturbing moments; but these are fully fleshed out. I guess the great difference here is that this is a lengthy novel (~300 pages) with all the exposition that comes with this format, and there is simply less opportunity in a slim play for this kind of development. But Adrian’s work is darker, and more graphic. (There is Sex. Seriously.) The ending is not lighthearted and happy as it is in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Among the mortal characters, we meet a tree doctor; men and women recovering from the suicides of loved ones; and the mess that OCD can make of a life; the lovers are gay and straight but always damaged. But the worlds are so fully realized… and the three youth are so fully developed, I ached for them. When every chapter closed, I regretted leaving that chapter’s focus character, but was happy to reunite with the next.

This was one of those books I was very sorry to see the end of. I wish there were more. Luckily, Adrian has written other books!

I recommend The Great Night. Certainly nothing is taken away from Shakespeare’s masterpiece; but this is a different realization of the same story-skeleton, in a different format, and it is absolutely an accomplishment all by itself.

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