These are a few of my favourite things

I've already compiled a list of my favourite books (click here), but I've never talked about some specific favourites: scenes, characters, romances, writing styles, settings. This needs rectifying immediately.

Scenes:
My enjoyment of literature is a little bit macabre, so I struggled to think of memorable scenes that weren't, well, deaths. If I got onto deaths, we'd be here all day, which is why I'll steer clear of them.

The first scene that came to mind was from 'Alice in Wonderland' and is one of the most famous scenes in literature: the Hatter's tea party. I've spoken about the use of nonsense before, but it is never more poignant than in this scene, where Alice gets asked the famous "How is a raven like a writing desk?", a riddle to which there is no answer. In this scene, the characters are stuck in an eternal tea-time, because time refuses to move forward from 6pm. The beauty of this scene is that it prompts the reader to ask a thousand questions about the futility of a search for knowledge, about the nature of time, about the rigid structure of society, without Carroll ever needing to ask those questions outright, and without him trying to provide the answers.

Since I was trying to avoid deaths, the second scene took a little time, but I eventually thought of the ending of 'Let It Snow', a trio of interlinked Christmas stories by three of my favourite authors. It's a cliché, but I absolutely adore endings where everything comes together at once and where all the characters meet up at the end. This is a technique used over and over again in epic battles to end the novel or series on, but this time it was simple and sweet and yes, okay, I cried at how cute it was. Essentially, the main characters of all three stories end up in Starbucks on Christmas morning and they all vaguely recognise each other and it's just a really happy scene and the cutest thing in all of fiction.

Romances:
I'd like to start off by saying that Romeo and Juliet don't deserve the credit they get -- Romeo was already "in love" with Rosaline when the story began, and five days later he and Juliet were both dead, having only really spent a few hours together. As much as I will sing Shakespeare's praise for many of his other plays, this one was irritating. Pointless death isn't romantic.

On to the couples I actually do like. One of the classic romantic tales turns out to be one of my favourites: that Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy in ‘Pride and Prejudice’. The thing about this story is that Darcy is socially so far above Lizzie, since he's excruciatingly rich, has powerful family ties, and is enviably handsome. (He also happens to be generous, intelligent, and thoughtful. Sure, he's stuck-up, but so are most people of his social ranking -- he just looks appalling next to Bingley, who happens to be the epitome of courtesy.) So Darcy is infinitely above Lizzie, right? But he falls in love with her anyway -- and not because of beauty, because he states very early on that she is "not handsome enough to tempt [him]". No, Darcy falls for Lizzie because she's intelligent, witty, and insightful. He loves her for her brains. And this was 1813! Oh, Jane Austen, I do love you.

From one of the most famous romances of all time, I go next to one that I guarantee nobody reading this will have heard of. The characters of Niall and Irial, from Melissa Marr's 'Wicked Lovely' series, have twelve millennia of backstory, since the characters are immortal faeries. Most of their romance is tragic – once again, my taste tends to fall closer to angst than cheer -- so they spend a very long time growing to trust each other again. It's a very real relationship, despite the fantasy setting; it's at once a sweet and sexy, and they're intensely protective of each other, but there are power struggles and betrayals and regrets that are never going to go away. Oh, and they're also both in love with a third person, named Leslie. It's complicated, and that's why I like it. Complicated is believable.


Writing styles:
John Green writes great stories with great characters, but the main reason why he's my favourite author is because of the way he manipulates words, such as -- well, picking just one quotation is impossible, so instead I'll link you to a list of them. I will, however, point out one of my favourite lines of his: “I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, then all at once.”

Similarly, Oscar Wilde will forever be regarded as one of my favourite writers because he's just so damn quotable. He wrote the line "We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars." Need I say more?

Maureen Johnson is on this list for an entirely different reason: I have found myself reading on of her novels at 2am because I couldn't put it down, and it forced me to muffle my laughter and then my sobs. She writes about death and love and misery, but she doesn't drag you down with the character -- she makes her protagonists sarcastic, her supporting characters silly, and her topics serious. It works for her as it wouldn't for the vast majority of authors. 


Settings:
I love elaborate worlds. I always want dozens of characters, a hundred settings, and several on-going plots running parallel to the main storyline. This, I think, is the reason for my love of the 'Harry Potter' series. How many other stories have such vivid settings as Hogwarts, the Burrow, Diagon Alley, Privet Drive, and the Ministry of Magic? There are an almost-uncountable number of characters, and every book has its own set of secondary plots. The series is rich in detail and overflowing with backstory, and I can’t help but love it.

As for literal settings, the city of Alicante in 'The Mortal Instruments' has always been beautiful in my imagination; after all, it is also known as the Glass City, named so for the defensive towers around the city that look as though they are made of glass. 

Of course, dystopian settings are always interesting, and they have a greater impact on the story than most settings do. Simple details in dystopian settings can reflect much of the ways of that society, as with the floor-to-ceiling screens in the houses of 'Fahrenheit 451'.


This post felt long, but it was fun to think about all of my favourite little things in books and how they can impact the overall story. As a writer, it's also useful to contemplate what made a novel or play particularly enjoyable or interesting to read, because it helps me to figure out exactly the best way to write what I want to write.

(You might have noticed that the one feature I listed in my opening paragraph that wasn’t discussed in its own section was ‘characters’ – this is because I had far too much to write and couldn’t cut it down to just talking about two or three characters. I could have happily written about thirty characters and have still had more to say.)

Faeries in 19th century Irish poetry

This post is a sequel-of-sorts to my previous post about 19th century English poetry. I'm going to be analysing and comparing the poems 'The Stolen Child' by W. B. Yeats, 'The Maids of Elfen-Mere' by William Allingham, and Samuel Ferguson's 'The Fairy Well of Lagnanay'.

Ferguson and Yeats both depict faeries as untrustworthy, if not outright dangerous. The moon, personified as having "taken flight" in 'The Stolen Child', can be a symbol of mystery, a sense of which is evident in all three poems, though it can alternatively symbolise death and darkness, linking faeries to danger. In 'The Fairy Well of Lagnanay', faeries are "a silent race" -- Ferguson's use of this modifier similarly creates a sense of mystery, as silence indicates secrecy. The faeries in Ferguson's poem are mostly referred to by the third-person pronoun "they", which is impersonal in its lack of specificity, suggesting a sort of omnipotence in a faceless race.   The imagery in 'The Fairy Well of Lagnanay' is decidedly negative; the metaphor "the memory which all my heart is haunting still" presents an unusual view of hearts, which are normally fragile and breakable, but which in this case has a description of being ghostly and oppressive.

The presentation of faeries in 'The Maids of Elfen-Mere' differs in that the faeries are more of a process than actual beings, and so they are dehumanised; they come "spinning to a pulsing cadence, singing songs of Elfin-Mere" every night and leave at the tolling of "the eleventh hour". Similarly, the faeries are described as "three doves on snowy plume" and as "three white lilies" -- objects and animals rather than women. However, Allingham uses these descriptions to link the faeries to the colour white, which is generally seen as a symbol of innocence and purity. Allingham tells of the Pastor's son, who winds back the clock to fool the faeries into staying for longer, but the faeries are killed by this act and all that is found of them is "three stains of gore". From this, we see that the faeries are in fact the victims, whose white innocence was reduced to red blood (where red is linked to sin and danger) by the Pastor's son "because true love should never lie". So here we see a role reversal similar to the English poems, in which the faery is the victim and the lustful, thoughtless human man is the one who causes the faeries' deaths.


Colour is also used in the other two poems. 'The Stolen Child' features "the reddest stolen cherries", where the superlative "reddest" emphasises the impossibility of anything being more evil or dangerous than the faeries, and the "dim grey sands" the faeries take the child to are intended to be a dull contrast to the dancing and the chaos of the faeries. Chaos is a lot less present in 'The Fairy Well of Lagnanay', as the faeries are more mysterious and cold, as is suggested by "the mountain's eye, cold and grey".

This stanza  is repeated:

"Come away, O human child!

To the waters and the wild

With a faery hand in hand,

For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand"

This is interesting because it suggests that, though the faeries might be mad and cruel, they are saving the child from a world of unthinkable sadness. The semantic field of water in 'The Stolen Child', such as "wandering water gushes" and "ferns drop their tears", seems to create a link to tears, which is particularly obvious in the line "the world's more full of weeping than you can understand", which is sinister because children are known to cry more than adults; this hints at a world unknown to the child where adults cry for much greater problems than the child can imagine. Being "hand in hand" creates a physical link between the faery and the child and demonstrates equality between the two of them, unlike the way humans could be expected to look down on the child.

Yeats' description of pools "that scarce could bathe a star" in 'The Stolen Child' perhaps uses a star as a symbol of childhood and is meant to imply that the child's innocence is washed away by adults, but as they travel farther into the realm of faeries this becomes "scarce". This idea of treasuring childhood is an idea of romanticism that became popular in the 19th century.


Music is heavily associated with faeries in Irish mythology, so it is to be expected the the faeries in each of these three poems are singing or dancing. In 'The Fairy Well of Lagnanay', the line "mournfully, sing mournfully" in repeated throughout, and is fairly ambiguous; whether this imperative was directed at the poem's audience or at the faeries is unknown. The singing in 'The Maids of Elfen-Mere' is alternately named as a "cadence" and as "lamentings", both of which are phonetically soft and lacking in harsh consonants, reflecting the gentle nature of Allingham's faeries. This contasts with the dynamic verbs "leap", "weaving", and "chase" in 'The Stolen Child', again showing the chaotic nature of the faeries in this poem.

The faeries in these poems are much more literal than those in the English poetry I analysed previously, but there is no consistency in the way they are depicted. This is quite likely a result of how legends and mythology can have many varients, especially in the case of Irish mythology, which was mostly passed down through word of mouth; even now it is difficult to find a telling of Irish mythology that is in any way complete or conclusive. Irish culture was heavily influenced by stories of faeries in the 19th century, and so its poetry is rich with mythology,