Won't you be my neighbour, neighbour?

Yesterday I was brooding again over how socially insulated I am these days. I do go out and interact sometimes, but it's still the case that most days the only people I talk to face-to-face are my coworkers and my partner. I'm not much of a phone person either and the age of intensive online contacts--when I would write long e-mails to distant friends--seem well behind me; now about from the rare extended IM chat it's all fleeting salutations and the occasional polite inquiry.

So I was particularly happy that, while taking my evening constitutional, I hit upon the idea of asking a neighbour to join me and even more happy that he accepted. This is one half of a gay couple I know through Game Night and who turn out to live only a few blocks south of us--the shyer half. In fact, it took half a year for me to discover he was a librarian. We took his dog down to Senn Park and talked about their recent trip to Amsterdam for the Koninginnedag festivities.

On the way, we saw an assortment of gorgeous Dutch irises and the first peonies of the year. He made me lament once more the dearth of foreign travel in my life and raised hopes that maybe I've finally--after nearly four years at this address--found a gay neighbour that I can call on informally when I feel the need to break a little from my well-worn routine of crouching in front of a little glowing screen.

Empty hat

Last night, upon returning from my stroll, I finished up The magician's wife. I found the ending effective and even moving, but not so much as to justify having read the the two hundred pages leading up to it. Till the end, the main characters remained unconvincing cyphers to me. I suppose that was intentional in the case of the magician of the title, but it was also true of the protagonist, who never persuaded me she had an interior life worth caring about. This is a real problem when (apart from a few apparent slips) the story is narrated solely from her point of view.

The author's failings are all exacerbated by the fact that I was reading another novel about a fictional mid-19th century Norman woman at the same time, and this one was written by a man many consider the greatest novelist of his generation, so Moore's novel can only suffer by comparison. Satan knows Emma Bovary annoyed the hell out of me at points, but I never doubted the verisimilitude of her portrayal. Emmeline Lambert, on the other hand, didn't seem realistic as either a female or a Frenchwoman.

The book comes perilously close to failing the Bechdel test (though to be fair, so does Bovary on a pound-for-pound basis). Not only does our heroine never really have a conversation with another female--even during a week of festivities at Compiègne--but you are seldom even told what she thinks of them. And there are enough holes in the depiction of her and her milieu as being "French" that by the end of it I found myself mentally sounding out the characters names with their English pronunciations (even turning "Henri" into "Henry").

The period detail also seems off, particularly in the amount of freedom Emmeline has to come and go. More than once, as if it were completely natural, she plunges unchaperoned into the bazaar of Algiers--a place where I'm sure many modern Frenchmen wouldn't allow their wives to go unaccompanied. There's as good as no mention of the particular unsuitedness of Second Empire fashion for the extremes of the Algerian climate.

It was only at the very end that I discovered the real-life basis for the novel: a mission to Algeria by the legendary conjurer Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin (that's right, the one Houdini named himself for) to awe the natives into pacification. I suspect reading his own account would've been a good deal more entertaining than reading Moore's attempt to turn it into a commentary on colonisation by shoehorning in a half-baked fictional spouse.