Very interesting observations, nottelling. When I read Tóibín’s The Master, I had not read much James. (I’m ashamed to admit that I still haven’t, except for Turn of the Screw – a favorite of mine! – and Daisy Miller, but I do know what you mean.)
The Master was better (and, to me, more challenging) because it was a more highly literary work than The Dig.
This group recently had an interesting experience reading a duo about a real person – Beryl Markham’'s memoir West With the Night along with the recent lightweight historical novel about Markham called Circling the Sun. Both books presented what was clearly a distorted picture of their subject. A couple of our members turned to biographies to try to resolve the confusion – and, boy, was our discussion lively!
“There’s something that is nagging at me about this book – does the fact that we are getting so much enrichment from outside sources speak to a failing in the book itself?”
I have wondered if the missing detail was somewhat intentional of Preston’s part. Like he did, in researching this book, we’re participating in our own dig of sorts by trying to fill in the blanks, to find these characters online, to “see” them or hear their voices captured in the abundance of available documents. Rory said of the missing people in photographs of Victorian London,
It makes me wonder anew at the marvels of our information highway and avenues for connection. We can learn so much by the recorded information. Yet, it’s never a substitute for having direct access to the living people. It’s one of my biggest frustrations with my own genealogical studies. Wise Rory mused over the shared thermos cup found, if it might be found in a distant future(p. 215),
Good point! And Preston’s comments through Rory certainly reinforce that idea.
If I had read The Dig alone, I would have finished it quickly, appreciated its “economical grace,” and forgotten it within a month. I would also not have fully understood or appreciated the magnitude of the discovery at Sutton Hoo. Fortunately, we have each other as living, breathing annotation and I’m grateful for everyone’s invaluable input.
I have mixed feelings about historical fiction. On the one hand, I need it because I don’t read much non-fiction and it’s a way for me to learn about the world. On the other hand, when I do read historical fiction, I feel like I’m constantly on guard: How much is the truth? Does the author have an agenda? Should I consult an outside source to verify events? I tend to read historical fiction with a cynical eye, which makes it harder to just fall blissfully into the story.
@NJTheatreMOM, the comments from @nottelling also made me think of Circling the Sun and West with the Night. In The Dig, John Preston adheres as closely to the facts as possible. Consequently, the story is (or initially appears to be) a bit dry, and the characters a bit thin. In Circling the Sun, Paula McClain takes liberties with the truth, and in the end I found that somewhat irritating and didn’t feel that I had an accurate picture of Beryl Markham. So there are pros and cons either way.
I will say this about The Dig: Once I became comfortable with John Preston’s spare writing style, I’ve enjoyed the challenge of reading between the lines and following up on the small mysteries he dangles before us.
I learned of the Sutton Hoo discovery and its “characters” in The Dig but relied on the internet to fill in the details. To be honest, historical fiction often bothers me. I end up wishing I had read something factual instead. (I squirmed through the reading of Circling the Sun. My real-life book club just read The Paris Wife by the same author and I didn’t join in. I just couldn’t. I do think everyone liked it though.) Anyway, The Dig maintains a distance - let’s call it a British reserve - that also seems to fit the characters and the times - with much below the surface. We are left to dig deeper, should we choose. Maybe it toed the line in the opposite direction though - offering too little vs. too much.
For me, the strength of the book lies in learning about Sutton Hoo, of course, but also its meandering into permanence vs. transience - including spiritualism and Victorian photographs. I love the detail of the found skate for that reason and thought it a fitting end to the book.
*Just read Mary’s post #82 - “great minds” once again - though once again she said it better.
The Dig was cool because it was well-written but made one want to “dig.” Other historical novels stand up well on their own. I adored the brilliant Wolf Hall and had very little desire to look up real historical info about Thomas Cromwell!
I found* Wolf Hall *irritating stylistically, but it was amusing to get a picture of Thomas Cromwell and Thomas More that was so different from *A Man for All Seasons./i I’ll always be sure Richard the Third was a good guy thanks to Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time. Historical fiction nearly always has me reaching for the history books trying to figure out how much is actually true.
I do like the idea that the spareness and incompleteness is deliberate. That we are meant to feel that we don’t have the complete story and probably never will.
As for what someone might dig up years from now. Has anyone seen David Macauley’s Motel of the Mysteries? It’s about the imaginary dig of an American motel thousands of years from now and the archeologists imagining what the various objects were for. Here’s the illustration of imagining the toilet as an object of worship: http://coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~fisher/hst140/MotelOfMysteries/MotelOfMysteries13.JPG
Ha, @mathmom, great answer to discussion question #10 (“1000 years from now, what do you imagine would be an exciting ‘treasure trove’ that archaeologists might discover from 2016?”)
quote Was Basil Brown treated fairly by Mrs. Pretty and the museum administrators? Would you have wanted him to respond any differently to his peremptory removal as head of the excavation?
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I don’t know if “fairly” is the word I’d use. I feel badly for him but can also understand the reluctance to let him continue in his role as head of the excavation once the importance of the dig came to light. To the museum administrators he doesn’t have the background needed - and of course one and all want the glory of finding the treasure. I don’t know that a different response would have helped him, particularly in that time and place (think class). At least Brown gets to remain on site and Mrs. Pretty makes sure he gets credit for his role in the discovery.
I like Basil Brown. He seems the true gentleman of the group though unrecognized as such by others. He handles his removal with grace. We demand more today it seems, but I think Basil Brown would still be demoted in favor of those with greater credentials.
Yes. At least the others acknowledge the quality of his work:
Basil Brown’s wife, May, seems to shout “class difference!!” more loudly than the gentle, quiet Basil. She obviously loves her husband and is proud of him (as evidenced by her rant to the group on p. 200), but her lack of education (self-taught or otherwise) and “rather wild appearance” make them an odd match. “May says I have far too many books. They nearly drive her mental” (p. 58).
I laughed at Reid Moir’s upper crust British response to May’s indignant speech about Basil: “Reid Moir’s only reaction to this was to brush the lapel of his jacket, very deliberately, with the index finger of his right hand.”
Poor Basil. Self taught working class guy, just couldn’t get any respect. I think he left his wife behind on purpose. It made it less obvious that he was of the wrong class. I’m glad though, that he did know what he was doing and didn’t do anything harmful. I’m not convinced all the educated guys were better!
I thought the incident where Basil was nearly buried alive was harrowing. I wonder if that happened in real life. Nowadays, there would be doctor visits and lawsuits–not simply some polite vomiting on the carpet and then back to work. From a literary standpoint, it seemed chock full of symbolism – sort of a memento mori: “We bones, lying here bare, await yours.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memento_mori
“Basil Brown’s wife, May, seems to shout “class difference!!” more loudly than the gentle, quiet Basil”
“I think he left his wife behind on purpose. It made it less obvious that he was of the wrong class.”
I suspect the class difference between Brown and the others would have been immediately apparent based on his accent. At one point, Mrs. Pretty noted that Brown has a “broad Suffolk accent.” My guess is that the accent would have been a constant reminder to the others that he was not of the same class.
I love accents and learning about different ones. Here’s a little clip of a couple of folks with a Suffolk accent speaking, if you want to imagine what Basil Brown likely sounded like (start at about 2:40 in the clip):
Preston chooses Basil Brown, Mrs. Pretty, and Peggy Pigott - three main points of view - rather than a third person narrative. I think this choice of Preston’s is what keeps us grasping for what lies below the surface. The book would have been so different with just a third person narrative of events. Most historical fiction I’ve read reads like a novel - think Circling the Sun - or the occasional first person accounting by one character. I’ve debated whether I would have preferred to read the story with myriad details filled in, rather than try to read between the lines (think Mrs. Pretty with Grately). Ultimately though I like how I see through the eyes of Brown, Pretty, Pigott. (Do you think the voices are distinctive enough? I never thought about it while reading.)
Funny you should ask…I opened the book randomly before I read your post, planning to look for a particular passage. When I first read what was in front of me, I didn’t know whether it was Peggy Piggott speaking or Mrs. Pretty. Of course, in another second the content made it quite clear–but not the voice itself. I didn’t think about it either while reading–probably because the sections are so clearly labeled.
If you think about Basil Brown’s voice in the context of @nottelling’s link above, then it appears that Preston did not do much to emphasize local dialect when writing his characters.
I liked having three different narrators, but I think that was another way he set us up for something he really didn’t deliver on. This is similar to the point I made way up thread about unreliable narrators.
When we, as modern readers, are presented with multiple narrators, I think we are primed to expect a Rashomon-type of experience where the different narrators will have different interpretations of the same events. This is especially true where there are all sorts of signals that the at least one narrator is going to be unreliable – like here, where the author gives us all the signals that Mrs. Pretty’s health and perhaps memory are failing, that she is interested in the occult, and that she seems sometimes to go into dreamlike states.
So I think he set us up strongly for the expectation that these three narrators will have wildly conflicting accounts. But it doesn’t really turn out that way; each narrators seems to have told their parts of the story straight, and there were no real conflicts in their versions of events.
I happen to really like books with multiple conflicting viewpoints, so I was a bit disappointed in this.
I did enjoy getting glimpses into three different lives and thought the different narrators were a strength of the book.
