Book Report Special: Excellent Women vs. Grendel

I was going to review Barbara Pym's Excellent Women, which I finished on Friday, but then I picked up John Gardner's Grendel, and polished that off over the weekend. It occurred to me that I could break literary ground by reviewing the two together. They're both about the same thing, really.

Pym's novel concerns a church-going woman in post-WWII England. She has some wacky but mild-mannered adventures in a very Jane Austen sort of way. Quite a bit of tea is consumed.

Gardner's is the same, just switch "church-going woman" for "man-beast of unusual strength and thoughtfulness." Also, maybe Jane Austen doesn't match. And switch "tea" for "human blood." Or mead, if you're talking about the Danes.

I immensely enjoyed both novels. I was encouraged to read Pym after a great lecture in January by my friend Susan, who used the term "Pymish" to describe the narrative style. It's very British, often silly, but also melancholy. Excellent Women is quite tightly edited, with a keen attention to detail and character. She doesn't pander to her readers in any way, but isn't snobbish, either.

I'm always fascinated with the British obsessions with formalities like tea time. Pym both plays along and around these traditions, poking fun but not condemning. That's a difficult task, but she pulls it off well.

Her protagonist, a certain Miss Lathbury, seems destined to become an old spinster. Her prospects for marriage have long since passed, and her desire for the three potential husbands in the story is muted. It's the type of book where you want the character to find happiness, but you also recognize that for her to get married would be entirely inconsistent with the book, and therefore that can't happen.

Grendel is a book I've been meaning to read for years. I'm a big fan of Beowulf and I love Gardner's reversal of the story. There's so much pretension and posturing in the original epic, it's great to have the humor and silliness in Grendel.

A few aspects of the writing bothered me, though. First, Gardner loves metaphors to the point of distraction. Take this, for example: "It's good at first to be out in the night, naked to the cold mechanics of the stars. Space hurls outward, falconswift, mounting like an irreversible injustice, a final disease. The cold night air is reality at last: indifferent to me as a stone face carved on a high cliff wall to show that the world is abandoned." If you strip away all the figurative language of those lines, you'd have: "It's good at first to be out in the night. The cold night air." Ok, so that's no good. I'd prefer a balance somewhere in between.

Also, modern-day profanity shows up in just a few spots. I found this distracting and unnecessary. I'm not against profanity, I just didn't think it fit in this book.

My only other problem with Grendel is the dragon. About midway through the book, Grendel visits an old dragon to discover the meaning of life, and the dragon goes on for a few pages spouting philosophy. I felt this was a cheap device, a way for Gardner to sound off and sound intelligent, but in fact it just turned me off of the writing.

All that being said, it was quite good. The way Beowulf enters at the end is handled very effectively. Also, the portrayal of Grendel's mother is excellent. Gardner definitely made a strong companion to the original.

I haven't really addressed the two novels together yet, so let me close with this: if Barbara Pym had written a parallel novel to Beowulf, it would probably be from Grendel's mother's point of view: Miss Grendel. She would mope about in her cave all day, frightfully bothered by the firesnakes, only occasionally venturing out for tea with cucumber and human head sandwiches. She might have a passing fancy for Hrothgar or Unferth, but ultimately both prove too brutish and un-Christian. There might be a minor scandal when her her son eats his way through a village, but these things happen.

I think it would be a terrific read.