The Lost Canterbury Tales

Shrek! Shrek! I'm silver, Shrek!

FLASHBACK

If you pursued an English major for more than five minutes, you read Chaucer. I had the (dis)pleasure of reading the whole thing in Middle English; not only did I sound like a brain-damaged pirate, I gained a deeper understanding of Chaucer's rhyme scheme when writing dirty stories about mistaken identity, pranks involving pseudo-rape and the actual kissing of butts. The hallmark of heritage literature. Kids, when your parents tell you that shows like Jackass are mind-rotting, putrid acts of humiliation, they're right, but you have the opportunity to argue that much of the content can be traced as literal interpretations of tales passed down and borrowed in European history, many of which are available for their perusal in The Canterbury Tales and The Decameron. You'll be mowing the lawn in no time, but the smug satisfaction of an academic explanation for your deviant behavior will put you well on the way to winning many an argument while losing many an ally.

I also vaguely remember something the "professor" had written about the Tales, in which we had to place each story on her "homoerotic continuum". At the time I went along with it, but complained to another professor about the silliness of the exercise. He concurred and said something insightful and poignant about the academic system being so out of whack that to get any attention (funding) anymore, one must concoct wild interpretations of established texts. I've forgotten it now, and because I've been out of the intelligentsia for years, in favor of surrounding myself with adolescents and their lack of sophistication, I now refer to that Chaucer class as Pin The Tail On The Gay Line. In honor of Geoffrey, I've penned a mighty limerick:

I once read a man named Chaucer

who fancied himself an author

we've studied his tales

- a class many fail - 

turns out he's a bit of a tosser

This is the first result for a GIS for "homoerotic continuum". I guess you could say it's for the birds. HA! HA!

FLIMSY CONNECTION TO BOOK REVIEW

Sonya Hartnett's The Silver Donkey has a parallel structure to the aforementioned works, but in this instance there is only one storyteller, and he only has tales featuring heroic donkeys. Think of him as a really lazy Aesop. Oh, and instead of telling stories to pass the time on a pilgrimage, the guy does so to entertain some Dudley Do-Right kids who might be his ticket home. 

While the stories serve as a break in the (in)action of the story, they also do a little to raise the esteem of the lowly donkey, who is apparently much maligned in WWI-era France. (Yes, it's another WWI book! But this time the story is away from the trenches, and it has the Jimmy Carter seal of approval, so you know it's about peace and/or building houses.) Our protagonist has run away from the front, but is overcome by blindness that slowly lifts over the course of the story. Is it self-inflicted? A nervous reaction to the horrors he witnessed in battle? Did he stare at the sun too long? He's found in a forest by two young girls who pledge to keep his secret and help him get across "the channel" to his homeland. Never does Hartnett reveal that it's the ENGLISH CHANNEL and that he's going home to ENGLAND. I used the power of context clues to make the connection in, I don't know, six seconds, but these are details I would have liked to actually see, for the sake of the YA reader. Bah, they'd probably get it. But, I know that YA boys are generally big on facts and locations. I know because I still act like one. 

So, the titular silver donkey is the linchpin to the story, and carries a special meaning to the runaway soldier, and to the girls he befriends. This could serve the double purpose of a primer for symbolism and pro-donkey propaganda in the classroom, which will, I'm sure, be misconstrued as some kind of endorsement of the Democratic Party. I can't wait to the Conservapedia version called The Golden Elephant, in which the soldier volunteers to fight, kills a hundred terrorists, and rescues the kidnapped Republican President, whose Secret Service code name is, you guessed it, Golden Elephant. 

Back to donkey symbolism. They're known for:

1. Stubbornness. 
2. Bearing burdens.
3. Jesus rode one into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday 
4. Helping kids get away with saying "ass".

Pretty impressive list. Hartnett covers 1 & 2 in full detail, and dips into Jesus territory when the soldier tells the tale of the donkey who carried Mary for days, all the way to the stables. So, donkeys aren't all bad. I'm seeing the ass at the end of the tunnel here. 

I should add that there can be an intro-to-intro to gender studies lesson within this book, when comparing the reaction to the soldier's stories by the young girls and the young boy, as well as the roles they play in getting the soldier on his way home without incident. The girls provide food, listen patiently to the tales and marvel at the shiny animal figurine, while the boy begs to hear details from the war and does all the actual work to book surreptitious passage back to England. I wonder what the Wife of Bath would make of this tale. 

The Silver Donkey treads where Chaucer rarely does, most likely because there are few easy laughs in altruism and the human predilection/instinct to help others in need. If you doubt we're capable of such behaviors at a young age, watch Alan Alda play with monkeys to get a fuller picture. I suppose, though, that we have our children read about kindness, compassion, and sharing when they're young so that when they read something as lurid as Chaucer, they realize that his complicated morality demonstrates realism at its finest (see the ambivalence of the Wife of Bath's prologue), much of the characters' behaviors are socially irresponsible (and therefore funny), and that fart jokes never go out of style. 

NEXT TIME, I YELL ABOUT

A book which I've wanted to read for quite some time. Teenage boys in Juvy struggle to make sense of their misdeeds and place in society. Let's just say that at one point in time this was our location!

BORING STUFF

The Silver Donkey

Sonya Hartnett

2004 Penguin (Australia) 

BIG McLARGE HUGE

NOW WATCH THIS

Today's review is in video form. All these years using digital technology and this is the first talking-head brand of video I've done. There are numerous shortcomings:

1. I went quickly to and from my notes, so most of the cuts have my head whipping up or down, and some final voice sounds are cut off. You'll get over it. Some weird distortion in spots, too.
2. I forgot to develop my points about my "expertise" and why it's a decent look at early 20th Century history.
3. Could have gone into more background on the characters to sell the book, but it's probably enough.
4. Ugh, I said Westerfeld's name wrong at least once.
5. The video hiccups during the "hand-wringing of the July-crisis" line.
6. My hair.

I'll certainly address these issues in future videos. And they'll be shorter. And I might yell more. Enjoy.


Click here to view on Youtube.

NEXT TIME, I YELL ABOUT

A book so serious in tone and urgency that I can't think of any good jokes for this space. Let's just say after reading it YOU'LL FEEL LIKE THE TITLE!

BORING STUFF

Leviathan

Scott Westerfield 

2009 Simon Pulse

Behemoth

Scott Westerfield 

2010 Simon Pulse

Goliath

Scott Westerfield 

2011 Simon Pulse

7. No mention of the fantastic illustrations on the cover art and within. It's good.

It's Eleven Eleven somewhere

I may as well rename this blog JB yells about YA books written on or about the two world wars. Something about me: I did my undergraduate history colloquium on the First World War, so I have some minor expertise. There's so much to this war in the run-up, combat (not military strategy, gross!) and aftermath that bears careful study, and it's one of my favorite topics to cover in world studies. Therefore, to find a YA book that covers this territory is both exciting and nauseating. If it really captures the essence of the time period and the socioeconomic outcomes, let the party begin. Should it fall short in any way, it's going in the bottom of the fireplace and coming out the top. So, I approached Paul Doswell's Eleven Eleven with trepidation. 

Three lives. No second chance. One ring to rule them all.

PLOT

It's November 11, 1918, so you know what that means - NO SCHOOL! Not so fast, kiddos. This is the day in which 11/11 became a holiday, SO LISTEN UP. Enough of that. It's the last day of the Great War. Three teenage boys, on the front somewhere in Belgium try, to survive the waning hours of combat before the armistice officially takes hold at 11 a.m.; a German infantry, a British scalliwag, and an American hotshot pilot converge and must help each other in order to escape alive. Now thaaat's INTRIGUE!

WRITING

Glance at Dowswell's bibliography and you'll see that he's churned out half a dozen YA war novels in the last decade after years of writing non-fiction. Good for you, Paul; facts are hard! The prose is clear, and Dowswell mixes sentence lengths, throws in plenty of military slang and German terms to lend some authenticity to the proceedings, and generally does well to describe the mucky, wracked setting of the tale. HOWEVER (oh boy, it's gonna get good!) I saw the term "dummkopf" and thought, "COPYKOPF." Anyone who regularly reads YA knows that Scott Westerfeld essentially took ownership of the term through his Leviathan series, another bunch of books set around WWI, but steampunked up in a dazzling style. Sorry Paul late to the party on that one. Worse: this guy obviously has a hard-on for aviation, to the point that it's detrimental to the story. He spends SO LONG describing Eddie, the suave American, joyriding in his tinderbox of a plane. Air combat during the First World War was new, unpredictable, and deserves to be noted, but after reading two solid pages describing banking maneuvers, slamming joysticks around (gross) and daring turns to evade enemies, I thought I'd mistakenly picked up the Red Baron's diary. Get me out of here. Get back to the story. DO SOMETHING. Oh, finally, he was shot down, and all because he was out looking for one more enemy plane to shoot up in order to officially be a flying ace. Why? TO IMPRESS A GIRL. Come. on. 

CHARACTERS 

Naturally, the American is the most detached and selfish of the lot, at first. I suppose that stands to reason, as the USA entered the war at late stages, and didn't have a cultural horse in the race. Nice touch when Eddie, first generation American of German descent, speaks Deutsche to Axel, the German soldier, who questions why these two German boys are fighting one another. But ONCE AGAIN, it is too reminiscent of another's work - in this case the almighty Vonnegut, who recounted a similar anecdote when he was taken prisoner during WWII. The British kid is William, I think. I'm not going to look it up. He was duped into volunteering for military duty by the father of a girl he courted. It's established that YA readers in general question the motives of adults, but to demonstrate such cynicism, yeeouch! Some pointed truth, brother. 

Overall, the characters function as vessels of fear and survival. they all long for something at home and clearly have no idea what they're doing in the middle of this war that long ago lost its meaning, congruent to their decision to drop nationalistic urges of violence in favor of surviving the waning hours of combat and shelling.

THE FINAL VERDICT 

It's not what I would imagine the standard WWI novel to be for YA readers, but it can do in a pinch. It's no All Quiet On The Western Front, (Copykopf alert! The ending of Eleven Eleven is A LOT LIKE All Quiet's), but it does belong in the clump of books to offer students to enrich their understanding of WWI, the horrors of warfare, delusions of nationalism, putting differences aside to work together, and the whims of fanatic heads of state. Or, they could try on these tunes:

This is what Eddie puts on his Walkman before every flight. 

Everything I know I learned from metal. And 20+ years of school/work experience. Mostly the latter.

Decent book. I'm not repulsed by it, but it won't be the first WWI fiction recommendation. 

Below are a couple non-fiction WWI books that have plenty of visuals and describe in detail the atrocious human condition and cost. I have used these in my WWI curriculum with great success:

The Experience of World War I by J.M. Winter

Eye Deep in Hell by John Ellis

NEXT TIME, I YELL ABOUT

A wordless book, sporting the same title as a forgettable Charlie Sheen movie, which doesn't narrow it down for you guessers. Let's just say this Arrival is better than this Arrival. 

BORING STUFF

Eleven Eleven

Paul Dowswell

2012 Bloomsbury