Media: Watching and Reading

Death Comes to Pemberley

Though usually not a fan of twenty-first century sequels to Jane Austen's books, I enjoyed reading P.D.James' Death Comes to Pemberley.  This novel is a sequel to Pride and Prejudice, and takes place at the stately home of the wealthy Darcy family, now headed by Austen's characters Darcy and Elizabeth, nee Bennet.  Death Comes to Pemberley was published in 2011, and made into a BBC series in 2013. We have now (finally) watched the miniseries and enjoyed it very much. 

The TV series is full of wonderful scenes with fine horse-drawn carriages and Georgian elegance.

The Bennett family from Pride and Prejudice continue to be quirky and amusing: Elizabeth, sensitive and responsible; Mrs. Bennet, self-centered and hypochondriacal; Lydia Bennet, a self-absorbed adolescent (even though she has reached her twenties by the time of this sequel); and also Darcy, still arrogant because of his money and social status. As the matron of a huge establishment with a large staff of servants, Elizabeth Bennet shows her calm and confident maturity.

At the beginning, Pemberley is buzzing with preparations for a ball, including incredible food scenes.
Here, Elizabeth is reviewing the food in the kitchen.

The servants are all ready and at attention as their work is reviewed.

Unlike in any actual Jane Austen novel, Death Comes to Pemberley soon sees a major act of violence with a murder in the dark woods in the middle of the night. While the original novels are domestic stories, mostly of young women who must make their way in a highly challenging social world, P.D.James' novel is a mystery full of action and impending danger, especially to the irresponsible and unlikeable rogue Wickham, husband of Lydia Bennet. 

I especially enjoyed the post-marriage portrait of Darcy. Although as I said, he’s still arrogant, he continues to love Elizabeth and in a way to obey her. I think the Austen character — who obviously would have embodied the values of his era — wouldn’t have been quite so easily managed. In the Washington Post, there’s a review of a new book that analyses the character of Darcy and his limitations, and also how the character influences modern ideals of boyfriends. (See this review)

While Austen almost never refers to the current events of her time, particularly the Napoleonic was and the earlier French Revolution, the characters in Death Comes to Pemberley are both aware and involved in these historic times. In both the novel and in the TV version, I enjoyed the drama and the re-imagined characters. I found both versions very true to the original novel while now in a totally new type of plot.

Not surprisingly, the costumes are also wonderful.

Land of Milk and Honey, A Foodie Dystopia

Land of Milk and Honey by C. Pam Zhang takes place after a global disaster has destroyed all wild and domestic animals, all crops and wild plants, and all possibility of restoring them. Or so it seems. What's left of humanity has only artificial, bioengineered food which tastes terrible. The narrator of this miserable post-apocalypse is a trained chef, and she finds a job in a restaurant at a secret location where the rarest delicacies have been preserved:

"Despite its vast store of ingredients, my employer’s restaurant defaulted, like others in that age, to familiar symbols of prestige. French classics with lots of cream, lots of butter, expensive ingredients, just money glopped on the plate. Money." (p. 19). 

High in the Italian Alps, the destroying smog that's killed everything but humans is mysteriously absent,  creating an end-times garden of Eden with underground storehouses full of heirloom produce and preserved game and domestic animals. This retreat belongs to an obscenely wealthy man, who is enjoying his private stash of gourmandise. He hires the narrator to be his chef for a restaurant where he woos investors in some secretive project to make him even wealthier and more powerful. 

Once this post-apocalypse scenario is set up, there's a plot, but it's kind of secondary to the food and wine descriptions, which read like a very exaggerated version of the old Gourmet magazine in its glory days. Like this: "To me that wine was fig and plum; volcanic soil; wheat fields shading to salt stone; sun; leather, well-baked; and finally, most lingering, strawberry." (p. 99).

Before the evil smog descended on mankind and on everything that grows, the narrator grew up in Los Angeles. As an adolescent, she defied her immigrant mother and trained to be a chef, but prior to that, she didn't live in a food paradise either. The predecessor of her gourmet life:

"Autumn was a harvest of big-box stores and their back-to-school sales: fruit leather, instant mac ’n’ cheese, and bread that we unhusked, crinkling, from its plastic sleeve. My mouth watered for the sweetness of processed wheat sown thick through gas stations from California to New York. Honey Buns and Wonder Breads, in perfect squares and machined circles, and the ripe weight of a Danish, mass-produced, that attempts no fidelity to the country after which it is named—no country but this one ambered by waves of industrial grain." (p. 154).

After the set-up of the catastrophic end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it and the secret stash of real food, the demands on the narrator's culinary skills get kind of weird with a lot of demand for cooking exotic animals that have been reconstructed through some kind of DNA science. She even is forced to prepare a meal of wooly mammoth which is disgusting, and other meat that's even more disgusting. 

A complex plot involving the employer and his young daughter seems to me to be kind of an afterthought to enable a wide variety of food descriptions. Maybe, I sometimes thought while reading, the author really just wanted to set up this imagined human fate. So I won't bother to describe it or the too-pat ending.

News

Recently, I have been spending a lot of time reading international, national, and local news and commentary. So much is going on in the world around me. A few of my obsessions: 

• Primarily, I'm following the news of the war in Israel, which changes every hour, and I keep hoping that somehow either diplomacy or battle will free the kidnapped hostages. Then maybe negotiations can take place. Unfortunately I've read all too many explanations of how Hamas wants a war that will keep them in power, not a peace that will replace them with more responsible government of their people. I fear the stated goal of Hamas: "a sustained conflict that ends any pretense of coexistence among Israel, Gaza and the countries around them." (source)
• The controversies about this war are dividing our country, as illustrated by the censure vote of the Palestinian representative in the US Congress. Her endorsement of extremist views of the war (especially quoting a slogan that has always signified a wish for the destruction of Israel and expulsion of all its Jewish citizens) is the most exaggerated example of divisions in our society. The outbreak of antisemitic rhetoric and even violence on college campuses is also very concerning.
• Tuesday's elections in various states, especially Ohio and Virginia, were very important. I'm glad that the voters expressed such strong support for women's rights to control their own bodies. 
• The many court cases against Trump are interesting and at the same time horrifying: how could we have put such a criminal in charge of our government, and how can it be possible that he might return to power and take revenge on all of us? 
• I was also interested in the trial of Sam Bankman-Fried, the cryptocurrency flim-flam man, and the revelation of how he spun such a con on people who should have known better. Unfortunately, putting him in jail for decades won't stop the next con man from preying on the same willing victims.

I guess I'm just a news junkie these days!

Blog post © 2023 mae sander

Photos from screen shots and BBC publicity.