Thursday 30 October 2014

The Curious Incident of a Brilliant, Finnish Theatre Experience

Alright, I'll have to explain that title. To be perfectly honest, the more I've learned about theatre and my own preferences in it, the more wary I've become of productions in my home country. There will probably be a separate blog post on this subject because I've actually given a lot of thought as to why I'm generally so unimpressed by Finnish theatre. Fortunately, though, I get to say generally and not always. Because sometimes, a production like The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time at Tampereen Työväen Teatteri will reveal how much potential there could be even in my home town.

The triumph of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time began in 2003, as a very successful mystery novel written by Mark Haddon. The novel won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award and the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize, just to name a few, and in 2012 it was adapted to the stage by Simon Stephens. The play went on to win a staggering amount of seven Laurence Olivier Awards, including Best New Play. So, when Tampereen Työväen Teatteri (one of the two biggest local theatres, originally a workers' theatre) staged it this autumn, I was both intensely intrigued and somewhat reassured to see a production that had already won so much acclaim in London. Now I can say, without a moment's hesitation, that TTT's Yöllisen koiran merkillinen tapaus is the best theatre production I have ever had the good fortune to see here in in Finland. It is respectful of the original Britishness of the play, simple yet stunningly effective in its visual execution, abundant in versatile actors and masterfully directed by Otso Kautto.


The play's rather singular title originates from a phrase that Sherlock Holmes coins in The Adventure of Silver Blaze. The protagonist is 15-year-old Christopher Boone, who starts investigating the death of his neighbour's dog, à la the Great Detective whose adventures he reads avidly. Asperger's syndrome makes it difficult for him to interact with people and his father seems especially opposed to his investigations, but eventually the clues lead Christopher to a revelation even more devastating than the identity of Wellington's killer.

The entire nine-man cast of this production is superb, and Jyrki Mänttäri does the most admirable job of all in carrying the weight of the principal role. Mänttäri is of course considerably older than his character, but he expresses Christopher's unwavering conviction, shattering feeling of betrayal, and everything in between with such credibility that you won't doubt for a second that you are watching a 15-year-old boy who never lies and doesn't understand metaphors. Auvo Vihro and Minna Hokkanen, a married couple in real life, make Ed and Judy's scenes thick with tension, and the way Miia Selin plays Christopher's teacher makes it perfectly self-evident that Christopher would draw inspiration and comfort from her when he faces a dilemma. The rest of the cast play a platoon of minor roles and are all extremely enjoyable to watch – Eeva-Riitta Salo's Mrs Alexander and Petra Ahola playing an ATM machine especially had the entire audience in stitches. Director Otso Kautto deserves all the praise I can possibly give for his work because all the (numerous!) funny bits roll on effortlessly, without ever lapsing into the domain of typically Finnish, overblown, eye-roll-inducing "comedy" with giant quotation marks. Equally, all the serious moments are given the space and the weight that they need in order to reach the audience. The scene where Christopher finds the letters (I won't be more specific than that, in case someone doesn't want spoilers about the plot) is especially chilling, combining Mänttäri's excellent physical expression, the best dialogue between Vihro and Hokkanen, and what is in my opinion the most genius part in Simon Stephens' script.


Normally, I'm not a visually-minded person and it shows very much in how I appreciate different forms of art. Reading a good book or listening to a wonderful piece of music is the best thing in the world, but place me in front of a painting and my mind goes completely blank, regardless of how exquisite and/or famous it is. I suppose being practically blind in my other eye might have contributed to my inclination of appreciating the none-visual aspects in life and in arts. When I go to the theatre, I'm always on the look-out for well-written dialogue and good delivery from the actors, rather than impressive staging. However, I'll have to say something about the visual execution of TTT's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, because it was brilliant enough that even I noticed how brilliant it was. Once again, that brilliance was founded in fearless simplicity. In the first act, there is nothing on the stage except a small, circular platform where Christopher stays throughout the action; other characters talk to him from the main stage and sometimes sit on the edge of his "bubble", but never quite share his space. It didn't hit me till the intermission that all the various scenes in the first act had taken place on this bare and simple staging – the fact is, the stage had served the story so accurately and the actors had carried the action so effortlessly that I doubt it ever crossed anyone's mind that the stage itself should somehow visually represent the setting.

In the beginning of the second act, Christopher undertakes a journey to London, and his safe bubble is gone. Instead, there are grey walls on wheels that look rather menacing, especially as they circle around poor, lost Christopher in a representation of his new, frightening surroundings. The entire journey sequence is marvelously presented; the walls transform into a Christopher-crushing tunnel, a train, a London tube station and a bedroom without a moment's hesitation. What to most people is a simple movement from point A to point B is an adventure of heroic proportions to Christopher. The atmosphere is set so accurately and the actors deliver so powerfully that you find yourself rooting for Christopher as if he was on a quest to save the world. As someone who has a very public long-distance love affair with London, I could only adore that short, but effective representation of the tube station in particular. It's really just a little moment where Christopher is surrounded by the diverse layers of the metropolis' population and an operatic busker provides background music, but I knew instantly where we were and rejoiced in the moment.

If you appreciate good theatre to any extent and if you happen to be anywhere near Tampere, I think you should see this play. I repeat, it is the best Finnish theatre production I have ever seen. Mark Haddon's novel and Simon Stephens' script make a solid foundation from which the cast and the production team have constructed a theatre experience that takes every advantage of the cleverness and truthfulness of the story they are telling.

Photos by Jouko Siro, from the TTT web page

Monday 20 October 2014

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

When you've spent most of your free time reading books for the greatest part of your life, you get used to having books fall more or less neatly into defined genres. There is of course nothing wrong with this – but those couple of times when you do meet a book that defies categorization, the whole world of literature suddenly feels a lot wider and full of things yet to explore. Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is one of these books.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell certainly manages to fit many things into its almost 800 pages. The setting is England and some other familiar parts of Europe in the early 1800s, so you could call it historical fiction. The title characters are two magicians striving to bring magic back to England, so you'd be compelled to call it a fantasy novel. All this is narrated and described in a confidently satirical style that bends itself to witty humour as well as pinpointing the most despicable qualities of human nature; look up any review of this novel, and it will always be likened to the style of Dickens and Austen, aka the gold-diggers of irony, with good reason.

I was probably eleven or twelve years old when I first tried to read this book, and I couldn't get past the second chapter. This review will show that I found great appreciation for Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell now, at the age of 23, but I would still say that it doesn't show its most favourable face in the first chapters. Even I, who adore big, slow-paced novels like The Lord of the Rings and Les Misérables, think that it takes Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell a little too long to get properly started. The starting premise for the story is that Northern England was reigned by a mysterious Raven King, also known as John Uskglass, who brought magic with him from the land of Faerie. By 1806, the Raven King's realm has been a part of regular England for hundreds of years and magic has dwindled into a purely theoretical, academic pastime of educated gentlemen. Suddenly, Mr Norrell steps in; in his Yorkshire home he has hoarded himself England's most impressive collection of magic books, and now he claims to be capable of practicing magic as well. The first chapters of the book are all about the Learned Society of York Magicians finding out about Mr Norrell and debating back and forth whether he is really capable of magic. It takes ages for Mr Norrell to actually prove himself right and subsequently decide that he must move to London and make magic more widely known. Then it takes an even longer time for the other leading man, Jonathan Strange, to appear.

Mr Norrell is a very well-written and unknowingly hilarious character with his deadpan-snarky, book-hoarding habits and I had loads of fun reading about him, but he is not the go-to man for making a dynamic storyline. As I read on about him awkwardly establishing himself in the London social life and making some very questionable friends, I got more and more impatient to meet Jonathan Strange. He serves as a charming, energetic, over-confident foil for Mr Norrell, and he is exactly what the story needs to reach a natural flow. By the middle of the book, there are a lot of great characters and mysterious story lines to look out for; first of all, there's the diabolical fairy whom Mr Norrell summons in order to complete a magic spell. He is never given any other name than "the gentleman with thistle-down hair" and he forces a Cabinet minister's wife and butler to attend all-night balls in his fairy-kingdom Lost-Hope, while also encouraging the butler, Stephen Black, to take revenge on all white Englishmen for making his people slaves. Meanwhile, Mr Norrell's servant Childermass appears to be hiding things from his employer, such as his acquaintance with Vinculus, whom Mr Norrell dismisses as a street charlatan who has nothing to do with real magic, but whose crucial importance is quite obvious to everyone else – for one, he makes a very mysterious and sinister prophecy about two English magicians and John Uskglass.

As you will notice, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell picks up its pace considerably after the somewhat stationary initial chapters. I don't think I've read anything except Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows as obsessively as I did the last third of this one. Little by little, the whiplash-witty Jane Austenish comedy of manners had morphed into a very dark tale of magic beyond human understanding and I had absolutely no idea where the story would end up, and I had to know. Boy, did this big book turn out to be the complete opposite of dull.

Illustration from the book, by Portia Rosenberg
Let's talk about the brilliance of the characters first. Susanna Clarke knows how to bring characters to life to the extent that you start seeing their faces in front of you and hearing their voices in your head. Mr Norrell, Jonathan Strange, Strange's wife Arabella, John Childermass, Stephen Black, that completely insane gentleman with the thistle-down hair – all of these characters and many others are masterfully done, but Mr Norrell was an especially great accomplishment. He isn't exactly likeable most of the time, but I got to know him so well in just the space of a couple of chapters that whenever he did those petty, self-centered things that he does, I found myself thinking "oh yes, that's exactly the kind of thing Mr Norrell would do", as if I was despairing over an irredeemable relative. (Not that I have any, especially if my relatives happen to be reading this.) The novel also features a couple of real historical personalities, and the best of these was Lord Wellington, later made Duke. Of course, the point that sealed my appreciation for this book was when Jonathan Strange got involved in the Napoleonic Wars – the little war nutter just loved all the exposition about the movements of Wellington's and Napoleon's armies, and all that soldierly atmosphere. Oh, and Lord Wellington – instead of going overly reverential about Britain's greatest war hero, Susanna Clarke once again creates a personality that you really feel like you get to know, and who is more hilarious than he probably intended.

The war campaign sections remind me of another aspect, besides the characters, that I really appreciated in Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell – the way it treats its fantasy element. It took me quite a while to grasp what "practicing magic" actually means in the universe of this book, and the solution is beautifully simple in the end, like all exceptionally clever concepts tend to be. Clarke manages to establish the existence of magic in the English history so convincingly that it supports the setting in the book's timeline as well, even though the reader is only given little snippets of the history of the Raven King and his once-realm in Northern England. You really get to understand what a fickle job Strange and Norrell are undertaking, trying to revive something that hasn't existed in England for hundreds of years. The portrayal of magic in Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell makes a very interesting comparison with most typical works of the fantasy genre, as it feels both smaller and bigger; smaller, in the sense that there are no climactic wizards' duels, no quests to save the world from an evil force, and Strange and Norrell often deliberately dismiss most of the flashy stuff that we are most used to associating with fantasy and magic as impractical; but bigger, because as the element of magic slowly takes over in the narrative, it places people's lives and fates at stake. If these characters are battling with anything, it would be the darkness in their own selves.



Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell was the first book in a very long time that I read as a Finnish translation, and I want to say a couple of words about the translation – because it was the best translation of a novel that I have ever read. Helene Bützow (whose other translation works include Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy) has done a fantastic job in providing the kind of vibrant, flowing translation that Susanna Clarke's writing deserves. I learned English at a very early age, and I soon started reading all English books in their original language, because the quality of the language almost always suffers in the translation process. There's always something in a translation that doesn't feel quite natural, something that makes it obvious that you're not reading the words of the original writer. Bützow, however, manages to convert the unabashedly  British atmosphere of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell into Finnish that is not only tolerable, but actually beautiful to read. She demonstrates how expressive and descriptive the Finnish language can be at its best by putting in absolutely lovely words such as hailakka, juurakko and villavatukkainen herra (which is the translation of "the gentleman with thistle-down hair"). The only thing I found a bit curious was that "Raven King" had been left untranslated. Not that any reader should have trouble understanding what those words mean (the novel is quite clearly targeted at adult readers, after all), but "the Raven King" is used as a title rather than a name, which is apparent by the inclusion of the article in the English version. "Raven King" translates into "Korppikuningas" in a very straightforward way, and in my opinion that translation has the same dark, mysterious feel as the original title. What would you say, Finnish readers?
Finnish readers could also tell me their opinion of this review on Helsingin Sanomat, from 2005. While I've been on the subject of Finnish language at its best, I was truly appalled at how that review shows our language at its worst. I don't despise that piece of writing just because it rates the book so negatively, but because that's supposed to be the leading newspaper in the country and the use of language is so... Well, what would you say?

So, if someone wanted to broaden their perspective of fantasy literature, I would point them towards Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell – especially if they happened to share my love for historical fiction and/or British irony. Susanna Clarke's novel is a very thoughtful and absorbing experience once you get past the first chapters, and it will have you both sniggering out loud and turning the pages in feverish excitement. Although, if you're a hardcore feminist, you might be somewhat disappointed about the use of female characters – I have to admit I was a bit, and I'm not in the hardcore feminist habit of looking for faults in every female depiction in every work of literature.

Now then, to finish off the post (which has been unusually long, like my couple of last posts have been too – what happened to my appreciation of concise writing?) I would desperately like to set up some discussion about Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. You see, despite the fact that the book got quite a bit of attention on its publication and was marketed as "Harry Potter for adults", it doesn't seem to be nearly as widely-known as it deserves. I myself know exactly two people (excluding myself) who have read it, and because this book was such a thought-provoking experience for me I would love to be able to properly discuss it with like-minded people! So let's get some conversation going on in the comments, shall we? And in order to give us the freedom to discuss whatever aspects of the book we want to, I'll say that people who don't want spoilers, don't read the comments, or the discussion questions I'm about to put up next. Yes, discussion questions! Of course, you can say absolutely anything you like about this novel, but I thought ready-made discussion topics might help kick off the conversation. And if you're interested in further reader participation, I could point out that I included a poll in my Hobbit review just for you readers!


  • What do you think about the female characters in Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell? The ones that can be described as "major" or at least important in any way are Arabella Strange and Lady Pole, and their main job in the narrative seems to be getting enchanted by the gentleman with thistle-down hair. This doesn't really lessen my enjoyment of the book, it just struck me as somewhat odd – given that Charles Dickens and Jane Austen, whose works had a great influence on this one, wrote hugely important female characters in their novels.
  • Who else was completely shocked about what happened between Mr Norrell, Lascelles and Childermass when they returned to Hurtfew Abbey in the end? Returning to Yorkshire where the story began was a very refined move in my opinion, I liked it a lot, but oh my God, that scumbag Lascelles cut Childermass' face. And Norrell chose to let him stay in the house. Now excuse my language, but what the Hell Norrell?! Mr Norrell did a fair share of not-so-great things in the course of the narrative, and that last one was The Worst. Do you think that sharing the curse of darkness with Strange was enough of a punishment to him, and did he ever realize how wrong he had been in some of the things he did? I would say no and no. At least, the book itself never shows us Mr Norrell repenting his actions, and that bothered me. Especially as I absolutely loved how Childermass developed in the book and cried like a baby when he went to the stables to ride away from Hurtfew Abbey and all the servants were there to show him respect.
  • I'm tremendously interested in cultural differences within countries, but I know very little about the North/South differences in England. Can anybody enlighten me on this? Does the division of the Raven King's Northern England and the "regular" Southern England serve some pre-existing perception on those cultural differences? 
Anyone who joins the discussion in the comments will have my eternal gratitude for giving me the opportunity to converse about a book that it seems nobody in Finland has heard of. Thank you in advance! Should I start putting discussion questions in all of my reviews?




Tuesday 14 October 2014

King Henry VI by William Shakespeare


I seem to be making a habit of getting immensely excited about Shakespeare’s earlier plays that the rest of the world firmly regards as ”not very good” attempts by a man who was to become the Bard but was not yet at the height of his genius. Well, alright, Titus Andronicus was quite impossible for me to like because it violated the rules of drama even worse than its poor characters, but I have a very special place in my drama geek’s heart for The Comedy of Errors, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and Timon of Athens – all of which are usually placed at the beginning of Shakespeare’s career, way before the ”great ones”. Now the same thing has happened with the three parts of King Henry VI.  

Shakespeare wrote two tetralogies, or series of four plays, about five consecutive kings of Britain. Richard II, the two parts of Henry IV and Henry V are called the ”second tetralogy” because they were written later, at a period when Shakespeare was starting to write his ”better” plays according to scholarly opinion. The three parts of Henry VI and Richard III are therefore called the ”first tetralogy” even though they actually take place after the second one. And even though Richard III was an instant hit at the time it was first performed and is still one of the most frequently-staged and well-known plays in Shakespearean canon, the first tetralogy as a whole is considered to be of a less refined quality than the second.

Say what you will, Shakespeareans, but Henry VI was an absolute page-turner for me, all three parts of it. I’m guessing that my attraction for these plays comes mostly from the fact that I find everything related to the politics and machinations behind wars hugely interesting. Essentially, I’m a war nutter – though I don’t really care for the part when people are actually on the field going bang bang at each other (or whatever the sound effect is in the case of swordfighting). So I really shouldn’t have been surprised to find myself liking a series of plays that depicts the Wars of the Roses. Here’s what happens: When the great warrior king Henry V dies, the crown passes to his infant son. Henry VI grows up heavily influenced by numerous noblemen of the court, including the Duke of Gloucester who is Protector of the kingdom. Gloucester, though, is one of the few who are actually loyal to the king, while most of the noblemen are scheming for their own profit entirely. Richard Plantagenet harbours a grudge against the royal house – the House of Lancaster – because in his eyes, the first Lancastrian king was a usurper and the crown should have stayed in the Plantagenet family. Even after King Henry makes him Duke of York, his hatred for the Lancasters persists. He gets into an argument with the Duke of Somerset, and the feud between the two men gradually grows into a fully-fledged war where Somerset’s faction wants to keep the Lancaster king Henry on the throne, and the Duke of York gathers supporters in order to take the throne for himself and, as he sees it, right the original wrong that Henry VI’s grandfather did to Richard II. This is not the only political strife going on – as was predicted at Henry V’s death, Henry VI loses all the French territories that his father conquered as his lords quarrel with each other and he is persuaded to make a politically worthless match with Margaret, daughter of a French nobleman somewhat down on his luck. When Margaret is made Henry’s queen, she takes an immediate disliking to the Duke of Gloucester, who has too much power over the king in her opinion. She gathers some noblemen on her side to finish off Gloucester. The Duke of York dies in battle, but his sons keep up the Yorkist cause – these sons will later become King Edward IV and King Richard III.

King Henry VI, r. 1422-1461

Whew, that was a long plot summary – but hey, that’s three plays, and as you probably noticed, there is a lot of scheming and back-stabbing going on. George R.R. Martin actually named the Wars of the Roses as a source of inspiration for A Song of Ice and Fire, so it’s not surprising at all that while reading Henry VI I was constantly thinking ”This is like Game of Thrones accelerated, SO AWESOME!” while I kept turning the pages like a war nutter gone, um, more nuts. Shakespeare took some liberties with historical accuracy when writing the first part of Henry VI, which deals with the loss of the French territories (with a guest appearance from Joan of Arc, who is here made a lying bitch who gets supernatural help from fiends instead of angels). For instance, Henry VI is old enough to marry in the play, while in reality he was just a baby. However, parts two and three are much more accurate, and go right to the roots of the Wars of the Roses. In an iconic scene, the Dukes of Somerset and York have an argument in the Temple gardens, and Somerset picks a red rose as his emblem while York picks a white one. Henry VI, who really doesn’t have clue about how politics work, insists that all of his noblemen must be equal and that he is very upset to see them disagreeing – but still, takes Somerset’s side in the argument, which then swells into royal proportions because of him.
Edward IV, r. 1461-1470
Henry VI couldn’t really be more different than Henry V, his father. His insignificance to the governing of Britain and the influence of the noblemen over him is made very clear from the very beginning – unlike all the other kings that Shakespeare wrote about, Henry VI doesn’t even appear till Act III of the first play. From there, things just go downhill for him, but it takes him quite a long time to realize just what his position is. Throughout the first two plays, he often stands meekly by while the various noblemen and his queen take turns in having massive rows in his presence, and even when he finally points out in the end that he is the king and therefore entitled to have his voice heard, Margaret has already taken his place as the symbol of the Lancastrian cause.

The fact that Shakespeare wrote so few female characters into his plays is an endless subject of woe for female enthusiasts – but I’d say that when the man did create a female character, they usually turned out damn fierce. Think about Lady Macbeth, Cleopatra, Portia, Rosalind, Paulina, Emilia – and Queen Margaret. My main motivation for reading through Henry VI was so I could get properly, well-informedly excited about the superstar-cast second series of The Hollow Crown. Now, just the prospect of seeing Sophie Okonedo play Margaret through this most interesting character arc is enough to reel my mind. She makes her first entrance to the Henry VI series when the English are fighting in France and the Earl of Suffolk, one of the many devious noblemen, decides to make a match between Margaret and Henry (he can’t marry Margaret himself because he already has a wife). His grand plan is to become the power behind the throne through Margaret. However, Margaret appears to possess quite a strong mind of her own. She plays an important part in bringing down Henry’s last loyal advisor, the Duke of Gloucester. She then feeds the flame of the Wars of the Roses by putting up a vehement opposition for the Yorkists, even when Henry starts to give in. When the two factions are lined up on the battle field, Margaret is also there, wearing armour, no matter how unnatural the men in the Yorkist side find it. She is furiously disappointed in her powerless husband and doesn’t keep quiet about it, and she is also a mother protecting a son whose inheritance of the throne is in danger. 

As action-packed and intriguing as the Henry VI series is, it does have its slow moments and a couple of plot-holes. Especially the first part wouldn't suffer at all for having a couple of scenes snapped off entirely, and sometimes it seems that the same characters have more or less the same argument twice, as if these quarrelsome characters didn't engage in enough verbal sparring already. The reason for Somerset and York's disagreement is some vague stuff about some law thing; seeing as this unspecified legal dispute leads to all that rose-picking, several murders and a great big civil war, it would have been very considerate to let the audience properly in on the background. A couple of characters suddenly pop up during the last scenes of the second part and as late as the third part, which in itself is completely fine, but then these late-comers suddenly become vitally important to the machinations of the civil war. Compared against some of the other characters, whose personalities and motivations have been developed from the very beginning, these newbies feel a bit plastered-on. Also, you shouldn't expect Henry VI to be an objective account of the Wars of the Roses; Shakespeare is quite clearly taking the Yorkist side. Seeing as he was writing at the time of Queen Elizabeth, whose dynasty had been founded by Henry VII marrying Elizabeth of York (daughter of Edward IV), it would probably have been unwise to favour the Lancasters. Then again, once the war between the factions was done he didn't have any qualms about writing Richard III as the most evil king ever in his next history play...

Still, even with those flaws present, the Henry VI plays are a lot better than what their status as "early plays" gives to understand. Shakespeare's earlier works are most commonly criticized for having less refined dialogue and more violence, which in some cases is a fair judgement (Titus Andronicus, that means you). I have to say though, I really enjoyed the language in all the Henry VI plays. Even if it's not as elevated in style as, say, Hamlet, there are many places where Shakespeare conveys an idea with heart-clenching precision. Whenever Queen Margaret opens her mouth for a monologue, you can expect an absolutely chilling delivery, and various characters, including Henry in one of his very few longer speeches near the end, say some pretty thoughtful stuff about why exactly the crown is so much coveted, with all the trouble it brings. Lots of characters die – in battle or in the hands of political enemies – but I wouldn't say there's any gore just for the sake of goriness. Each death happens for a reason, even if those reasons are all connected to the devastating premise of a country fighting within itself.

Who's with me in hugely anticipating the second series of The Hollow Crown? I'll be reading and reviewing Richard III very soon, and then I'll have to do a post about the cast that has been revealed so far, because boy are there some wonderful actors included!


Saturday 11 October 2014

Day of the Girl

No book reviews or any of my other usual stuff today, folks – it's the UN's and Plan's Day of the Girl and that's very important.

Plan arranged quite an effective campaign for this year's Day of the Girl. One of the organisation's goals is to raise awareness of the fact that a shocking number of 15 million young girls are made child brides every year. From a Western point of view, all this happens somewhere very far away in very different cultures than ours. Can we really grasp what sorts of consequences marriage at an early age can have, what those millions of girls are being subjected to? Well, now 12-year-old "Thea" helps us visualize that as she blogs about preparing to be the first child bride in Norway.

Fortunately, the Norwegian law doesn't actually allow child marriages – "Thea" is a fictional character created specifically for the Plan campaign, as is the blog. That, however, doesn't lessen the power of the blog at all. Even though you know no such wedding is going to happen, when "Thea" writes about her thoughts on the prospect of moving in with her 37-year-old husband and quitting school because said husband will want her at home, you can't help feeling very disturbed. The blog also includes pictures of "Thea" trying on wedding dresses.

"Thea's" wedding, scheduled for today, did not happen. Still, the things that are written on her blog are reality for too many girls out there, and they are most likely not going to share the experience online.

Theas bryllupsblogg – apparently, this is where I put my skills in Swedish to good use for the first time since I took matriculation exams. Om du kan svenska, you'll be able to read it reasonably well.

Here is a couple of lines about the blog campaign in English.

PS. What a wonderful coincidence it is that Malala Yousafzai, who has raised her voice so fearlessly to support girls' right for education, was given the Nobel Peace Prize just yesterday, jointly with Kailash Satyarthi.

Friday 10 October 2014

The Guardian's "1000 novels everyone must read"

Finland has a lot of "national days of this and that", which are often celebrated on the birthday of a notable Finnish personality. They are not official holidays and it really depends on one's own interest how much or how little you care to mark the occasion. Personally, I mostly forget about these various dates completely and wouldn't even notice they existed if it wasn't for all the Finnish flags being hoisted up. Today, however, I'm actually aware that it's the birthday of Aleksis Kivi, which also stands for the national day of Finnish literature. Aleksis Kivi is renowned as the author of Seven Brothers (Seitsemän veljestä) – one of the first Finnish novels ever, published in 1870 – and he is also considered a Finnish pioneer in the genre of realism, and one of the first people over here to make their entire living by writing – though this never quite worked out as well as Kivi might have wished and his life was unstable both mentally and financially.

Well, my relationship with Finnish literature is what it is, but as I was planning a bookish blog post anyway, I will take this chance to appreciate literature in a more global sense. So here follows the original post which I planned some days ago and which now fits in very conveniently with the national day of literature.

While the BBC booklist went around the internet last spring, The Guardian's list of 1000 Novels Everyone Must Read that had been compiled in 2009 re-surfaced. This list had been made by the Guardian's review team and a panel of expert judges, rather than by a public poll. I hope that readers everywhere will choose their reading according to their own interests (and occasionally because the teacher said so) instead of feeling pressure from some "definitive" list, but of course it was very interesting to see what this list looked like – and how I measured up against it myself. You can get your score on List Challenges. Here is what I have read out of the list:

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Mansfield Park by Jane Austen
Emma by Jane Austen
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
A Study in Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle
The Sign of Four by Arthur Conan Doyle
The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle
My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell
Silas Marner by George Eliot
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
Earthsea series by Ursula K. LeGuin
The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis
Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone by J.K. Rowling
The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Black Beauty by Anna Sewell
White Teeth by Zadie Smith
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
Ballet Shoes by Noel Streatfeild
The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne

That's 33 novels, which makes 3,3% out of the list. There were also a couple of books on the list that I started but never finished: Lord of the Flies by William Golding, The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco, and the His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman. The first two I gave up because I got too bored, but I really don't understand why I never finished the last book of His Dark Materials, because I was absolutely fascinated by the first two. I must have been busy with other stuff and put the book aside in order to return to it at a better time. I'll have to keep that in mind. I've also read City of Glass, which is one part of Paul Auster's The New York Trilogy – I didn't think much of it, it was one of those compulsory reads for a University course. 

There were also many books on that list that I will definitely be reading some day. I just made myself a "near-future reading list" (meaning "I won't take up any other reading till I've finished these") which happens to include eight books from the Guardian list. (My "far-future reading list" is vague and constantly changing, with no time limits except "before I die" and includes all the Charles Dickens books, for example.)

Thursday 9 October 2014

The Hobbit, or There And Back Again

In 1936, a 10-year-old boy had the power to decide whether or not his father's publishing house was going to print out a manuscript that he had been given to read. In 2014, a 23-year-old woman is immensely glad that the boy said "yes" – because that manuscript was one of J.R.R. Tolkien's, which we nowadays know as The Hobbit, or There And Back Again!

I don't know if I belong to a minority here, but I read The Lord of the Rings before The Hobbit. I was deeply impressed by the character of Bilbo Baggins right from the start, and was absolutely thrilled when one of my friends told me there was actually a sort of prequel to Rings that was centered around my favourite hobbit. This same amazing person then gave The Hobbit to me as a birthday gift, and since then I have been reading it more or less once a year – so here we have one more example of a "children's book" that can cross over age classifications.

This is the part where I'm done with the introduction and intend to move on to my thoughts on the book, but before I do that I just have to mention really quickly that all the pictures in this post are by John Howe, who has made many wonderful illustrations for Tolkien's works. He even impressed Peter Jackson, who hired him (and Alan Lee) to do conceptual design for the films. So remember to admire John Howe's artwork while you read the post, alright?

Bilbo's Front Hall
In this age when movie-goers everywhere have seen two-thirds of Peter Jackson's epic, block-buster take on The Hobbit, is there anyone who doesn't know the story? Well, it seems I need that plot summary for myself in order to decide what things I want to point out, so here goes: Bilbo Baggins is a hobbit who lives a quiet and comfortable life in the finest hobbit-hole of the village until the wizard Gandalf comes by with the idea that Bilbo would make a good addition to a company of 13 dwarves who are about to embark on a long journey to the Lonely Mountain, which they intend to take back from the evil dragon Smaug whose attack on the mountain ended a once-thriving kingdom. Thorin Oakenshield, the leader of the dwarf company, is the descendant of the King under the Mountain and becomes more and more obsessed with gaining back his home as well as the fabulous treasure that the dragon guards. The 13 dwarves and the bemused hobbit encounter many adventures and dangers on their long journey, and little by little Bilbo proves his worth as Gandalf predicted. He also plays the famous match of riddles against Gollum and acquires a mysterious ring without having any idea how important this discovery will be.

An Unexpected Party
I should warn you that this book review is in great danger of becoming a Shameless Tribute to the Incomparable Awesomeness of Bilbo Baggins. Really, though, who can blame me for that? What is there not to admire about Bilbo Baggins? He is the very definition of an unlikely hero who has to end up in tight spots in order to show his best qualities. The dwarves would never have got past Mirkwood without Bilbo! He develops from an uncertain tag-along to a respected member of Thorin's company, and finally he makes decisions of his own when he realizes that Thorin's quest might not be so rightful and respectable after all. There is a great Genius Bilbo Moment in almost every chapter, and each of them builds his character significantly. He accepts that he is small and apparently insignificant to everyone around him, and he is smart enough to use it for his advantage. Everyone should take notes from Bilbo, seriously.

Gwaihir's Eyrie
One of the most common criticisms agains The Hobbit is that Bilbo is pretty much the only well-rounded character. The company of dwarves is mainly a bunch of confusingly similar names with no individual personalities, apart from Thorin whose long-kept bitterness and growing greed get a fair amount of attention especially towards the end of the book. The other 12 dwarves, on the other hand; Balin is the wise one, Bombur is the fat one, and Óin and Glóin light the fire – that's pretty much all you get out of them. One of my favourite things in the first Hobbit film was how they managed to make the dwarves into proper characters. Frankly, I don't mind their under-development in the book that much, because Bilbo makes up for them and there is so much going on anyway.

Smaug the Golden
The Hobbit is a proper adventure story in the sense that there's a wonderful variety of  locations. The places I always look forward to most when I travel with Bilbo and the dwarves are Rivendell, Beorn's house, the Woodland King's court and Lake Town. Tolkien doesn't devote quite as many pages to setting the scene and describing everything in minute detail as he does in The Lord of the Rings, but that's alright because I don't mind having the freedom to imagine. I'm especially intrigued by the elves of Mirkwood – the first Middle-Earth elves I met were the noble, serene and profoundly wise Eldar in The Lord of the Rings, and I quite like their wilder relatives in the dark, scary woods. Even if they are a little unreasonable in imprisoning the dwarves, you have to give them credit for going on hunting trips in a forest infested with giant spiders. Besides, King Thranduil turns out to be pretty decent in the end.

Smaug Destroys Lake Town
To finish off the review, let's get back to Bilbo's Incomparable Awesomeness – I managed to shut up about it for two paragraphs already, didn't I? Somewhere back between the first and second Hobbit films, there was a website that I can't find anymore which posted a rather brilliant poll on Bilbo's best moments. So I'm going to list all of Bilbo's great deeds in a similar fashion and ask you to comment on what is your favourite and why. And, to be absolutely mean, I'm going to make you choose just one. If you haven't read the book and don't want spoilers on the remaining Hobbit film, you probably should skip the poll.

So, what in your opinion was Bilbo's bravest deed on his journey to the Lonely Mountain?


  1. Deciding to go on an adventure in the first place
  2. Sneaking up on the trolls
  3. Playing riddles with Gollum
  4. Saving his friends from the giant spiders
  5. Getting everyone out of King Thranduil's dungeons
  6. Burgling from Smaug
  7. Giving the Arkenstone to Bard and King Thranduil behind Thorin's back
My choice would be number 7, without a doubt. After doing so much to aid the dwarves, Bilbo realizes that Thorin has been overcome by greed and the best thing to do is that one thing that will upset Thorin the most. 


Wednesday 8 October 2014

White Teeth

I love my classic authors so much that I tend to forget about the ones who are in the business right now. Some of them might even be great enough to become the Dickenses and Austens of our times! So I made an effort to patch up the void in my knowledge of current literature and picked up Zadie Smith's debut novel, White Teeth, which has gained a great deal of critical success since its publication in 2000 and made the young author's name very well known. I was thrilled to find out that I enjoyed White Teeth immensely, and in fact I already have Smith's newest book, N-W, waiting for its turn in my book shelf.

White Teeth is one of those books that you should not assess based on how other people try to describe it to you. The answer to the simple question "What's it about?" is so deceptively ordinary. In Willesden, North-West London, there reside two families of different cultural backgrounds. The families are connected by the long-lasting friendship between the fathers, Archie Jones and Samad Iqbal, who served in the Second World War on its very last days, though they missed all the action. Now in their middle ages, they are still missing the action, leading completely mundane lives and disappointing their much younger wives. Archie is married to Clara, who tied the knot mainly to escape from her mother Hortense, a fanatic Jehovah's Witness since the day she was born in the middle of an earthquake in Jamaica. Archie and Clara's daughter, Irie, feels the pressure of white girls' beauty standards and turns to her Jamaican roots and estranged grandmother to find answers. Samad and his wife Alsana are Bangladeshi Muslims who think the Western ideals will have a negative effect on their twin sons, Magid and Millat. Further complications arise for both families when the young people meet the English/Jewish Chalfen family, who think they are the most perfect family in the world and insist that the tragically culture-confused Jones and Iqbal children desperately need their guidance.

Knowing beforehand that White Teeth was Zadie Smith's first novel and that she was just 25 years old when it was published, I was constantly amazed at how well she manages to keep together a story that explores so many characters and all the various themes and ideologies connected to them. The book touches upon quite a massive amount of topics, from World War II to the ethics of science, the agony of parenting to religious and political fanaticism. Still, including all these themes doesn't feel strained or pretentious at all in the end, because it all comes back to the characters and why they are dealing with all these things in the first place. Despite having a multi-ethnic cast of characters, White Teeth is essentially about the most basic human needs and aspirations, shared by everyone regardless of cultural background. What's more, Smith succeeds in making these people's ordinary lives the most engaging and vibrant thing in the world.

Zadie Smith's writing has a wonderful confidence to it. She makes use of symbols and quirky narrative techniques in a way that makes White Teeth an entertaining as well as intellectual reading experience. The title itself is a very good example of her way of keeping the reader constantly thinking; the theme of teeth comes up constantly, in the names of chapters as well as the narration itself. I had to read the book all the way through before I realized what the heck was up with the constant teeth references. It was yet another way of making a point that people in an ethnically diverse society have something essential in common – white teeth, for one.

Another narrative quirk that I really, really loved about White Teeth was how there would be constant little hints about the great importance of something that happened in the past, but you'd have to read at least another hundred pages before you found out how it actually went. Smith writes in things like this constantly, and manages to place them precisely on the line between infuriating and intriguing, which is absolutely delicious. For example, Samad makes constant references to his great-grandfather Mangal Pande, who was a great hero of the Sepoy Rebellion according to his obsessively admiring descendant. However, when the truth is finally revealed to the reader, it turns out to be something quite different but morbidly hilarious (well, it resonated with my sense of humour anyway).

I revealed in an Ask Me Anything post a while back that I'm hugely interested in anything to do with British Imperialism. This area of interest also covers colonialism, post-colonialism, basically anything that explores the effects of the British Empire in the past as well as the present. White Teeth provides a very rewarding experience if you want to read it from a post-colonial angle, as I was naturally very willing to do. The opportunities for this sort of interpretation were in fact so exciting that the post-colonially-observing-part of my brain was constantly exploding away like little fireworks. The best part for me was probably the endless possibilities that the reading of the Iqbal twins provided; instead of growing into the exemplary, tradition-abiding sons that Samad wished for, one of them joins a radical Muslim society and the other rejects religion completely in favour of the worship of scientific progress that Marcus Chalfen represents and identifies in every way as more Western than Western people themselves. Then there are of course the Chalfens themselves, with Marcus' rose-tinted views on the progress of modern Western society, and Joy's ridiculous views on the "special needs" of ethnic minorities.

All of the main characters in White Teeth are very interesting to read, as each of them gets a well-developed backstory and a thorough exploration as to how their past experiences affect their views on the world, which is a constant theme in the novel. What is especially marvelous, though, is how Smith is not reluctant at all to poke fun at her characters, no matter how serious their role in the overall story is. Smith also has a talent of providing a very vivid image of each character by means of just a few, well-placed details – something which strongly reminded me of J.K. Rowling's writing. In fact, I enjoyed White Teeth in very much the same ways as I did The Casual Vacancy. Smith has a way of making her characters behave in completely unexpected ways and make frankly outrageous decisions, but then she pulls them back from the very edge of credibility by giving us a completely human, if humanly faulty, reason for the characters' conduct. For example – how on Earth does 19-year-old Clara Bowden, striking in both looks and optimism, end up married to middle-aged, unambitious Archie Jones after knowing him for just six weeks? Well, reading through Clara's childhood with her religiously fanatic mother sheds considerable light on the matter.

In fact, one of the few disappointments that I had with White Teeth was that I felt Clara's character was dropped too early on. She gets such a fascinating and lengthy back story, which is precisely why I would have liked to get another look inside her head after she's become a wife and a mother. As all the other characters took over the pages, there wasn't really a chance to see what Clara was thinking about her settled life, apart from a few snippets of conversation with Samad's wife Alsana who is in a similar situation but is much more verbal about her husband's shortcomings.

I'm also not quite sure how I feel about the book's ending. I won't give any spoilers here – I'll just say that there's a very dramatic revelation and some skirmish, then there are just a couple of pages left to pull everything together. As awed as I was by the revelation, which I didn't see coming at all, I thought the resolution to it was very rushed and somewhat chaotic. Then again... I couldn't help actually liking the chaotic feel just a bit. I could also argue that the ending isn't even meant to be neat and in line with the laws of drama – Zadie Smith has been bending those rules this way and that throughout the book, to make a point that messy human lives rarely conform to aesthetic ideals.

I think the length of this review is a prime example of what happens when I have read something that made me Very Excited. White Teeth was my first plunge to modern literature in a very long time, and it didn't disappoint. I'll be picking up contemporary authors with much more faith from now on, and I will definitely be re-visiting Zadie Smith in the near future with N-W. 


Wednesday 1 October 2014

Finnish and Quenya

I just found out that if you Google search "Kalevala Middle-Earth", my blog post Traces of Kalevala in Middle-Earth will come up on the first page of search results – how amazing is that?!

Today's post will continue the theme of Finland and Middle-Earth. Non-Finnish Tolkien fans have often asked me how much Finnish and Quenya (the High Elven language in Tolkien's works) actually have in common, since the latter supposedly drew inspiration from the former. I'm going to try and shed some light on the question. I admit that I haven't done any extensive study on the grammar and linguistics of Quenya, but I'm familiar with some of its basic principles and can definitely make some comment on how it relates to Finnish, which is my first language. It is not my intention to make a linguistic essay out of this, so I'll try to avoid saying things like "sonorants" and "voiced stops". I'm mostly just providing a viewpoint on what Quenya looks like to an average Finn.

Most of the "Elvish" language that is spoken in The Lord of the Rings, both book and film versions, is actually Sindarin, which was mainly influenced by Celtic (most notably Welsh) and Germanic languages. There is, however, one very good and lengthy example of Quenya in the chapter Farewell to Lórien where Galadriel sings as the Company depart. I'm going to attach the lyrics of that song right here for illustrational purposes:

Ai! laurië lantar lassi súrinen

yéni únótimë ve rámar aldaron!
Yéni ve lintë yuldar avánier
mi oromardi lisse-miruvóreva
Andúnë pella, Vardo tellumar
nu luini yassen tintilar i eleni
ómaryo airetári-lirinen

Si man i yulman nin enquantuva?


An si Tintallë Varda Oiolossëo

ve fanyar máryat Elentári ortanë,
ar ilyë tier undulávë lumbulë;
ar sindanóriello caita mornië
i falmalinnar imbë met, ar hisië
untúpa Calaciryo miri oialë.
Si vanwa ná, Rómello vanwa Valimar!

Namárië! Nai hiruvalyë Valimar.

Nai elyë hiruva. Namárië!



The Alphabet

I'm going to start off with the most immediately perceptible feature of language. In this respect, Quenya includes quite a lot of things that Finnish doesn't. First of all, written Finnish doesn't use any kinds of accent marks or the e with dots on it. Accent marks aren't needed because the stress is always, and I mean always, placed on the first syllable, which is one important difference with Quenya. Also, the letters b, c, f, q, w, x and z never appear in native Finnish words, though we do have them in lots of loan words. 


Now, we have to get back to the subject of letters with dots. Like I said, Finnish doesn't have ë, but we do have ä and ö. You would find these in Quenya words as well – for example, the word for the Universe in which Middle-Earth exists is Eä. However, the dotted letters have a bit of a different function in the two languages. If you take a look at the Quenyan song lyrics, you'll notice that the ë appears most often with another vowel right before or after it, or if that's not the case then it will be at the end of the word. So, Quenya uses the dotted letters to signify that they should be pronounced as separate vowels, even when they appear right next to other vowels or at the end, but dotted vowels are still essentially the same letters and sounds as the undotted ones. In Finnish, though, the addition of dots changes the pronunciation entirely and can also change the meaning of the whole word. For example, Väinö is a man's name, but vaino means persecution; moi is the equivalent of hi, but möi is the past tense of the verb to sell. Ä is always pronounced like the first vowel in apple, and nearest equivalent I can think of for the pronunciation of ö would be the British pronunciation of the vowel sound in curse – though it's by no means a perfect example of it. 



Pronunciation


In one respect, Finnish and Quenya agree perfectly: everything is pronounced exactly as it's written. Each vowel is pronounced separately even if they appear next to another vowel, and the pronunciation of r is similar to Spanish and Swedish (just a couple of examples). Here's a video where Tolkien himself recites the poem that I showed above:




If you asked a Finn to recite the same poem with no knowledge of Quenya pronunciation, there would no doubt be some differences in the overall rhythm and colour of speech (because that part was inspired by Latin more than by Finnish), but they would get the essentials right (except they might be confused about what to do with all the c's). When I first read The Lord of the Rings aged thirteen, in my mind I simply pronounced all the Elvish names like I would have done in Finnish; later, I found out that that was exactly what Tolkien had intended. I imagine an Anglophone's first instinct would be to pronounce Sauron something like saw-ron, but a Finn would get it right automatically. We also wouldn't say things like Minus Tirith or Orodroown. 



Grammar

I'm not going to go too deeply into this section because firstly, as I mentioned I really don't know that much about Quenya, and secondly, because I still don't want to make this blog post a full-blown linguistics monster. 

Anyway, there was one quality in the Finnish language that particularly interested Tolkien: agglutination. Basically, it means that the kind of things that are expressed in languages like English by means of prepositions are in Finnish put into little "word bits" (I made that up) that are just attached to the main word. Usually, Finnish doesn't even need to employ things like personal pronouns because you can tell by the verb conjugation who the subject is. Visually, this means that Finnish sentences often have much fewer words than English ones, but our words tend to be ridiculously long. Example: you can say I wonder if we would see in a single Finnish word: näkisimmeköhän. Tolkien found this discovery so thrilling that he would later write: 

"It was like discovering a complete wine-cellar filled with bottles of an amazing wine of a kind and flavour never tasted before. It quite intoxicated me."

Apparently, a massively excited linguistics geek produces the most wonderful expressions ever. They should do this more often! Tolkien would of course make his Quenya an agglutinative language as well, and even took it to a higher level than Finnish. Another example: in Quenya, the single word utúvienyes means I have found it. But even in Finnish, you would need three words to express the same: olen löytänyt sen. So sometimes, Quenya agglutinates things that Finnish doesn't. 


This will be the last post on my Tolkien Blog Party series. To Hamlette, I would like to say a big hantanyel! for hosting such an amazing blog party. For you readers, I hope my couple of posts about Tolkien's mythology from a Finnish point of view have been more interesting than boring.