Daily Book Excerpt: YA/Children’s books:
Along the Shore
This story (much longer than many of her others) was written in 1908 – and Lucy Maud fans will recognize many elements which show up in other books, written later:
1. There’s a Kilmeny of the Orchard
2. Lynde Oliver (the heroine of our story – the most beautiful girl in the world) is walking along the lake shore one day – sees a flower just out of reach – tries to grab it, and then basically falls over the side of a cliff, hanging on to the edge for dear life. If she lets go – she will plummet to the rocks below. Then who saunters along but Alan Douglas – the guy who is the main character, the story is through his point of view. Anyway – he runs off to wherever – gets a rope – comes back – and saves Lynde. Any Emily fan worth her salt will recognize this entire episode.
3. And the plot-twist – the big ol’ secret that Lynde Oliver is carrying around – is akin to the Leslie Moore situation in Anne’s House of Dreams
So this book is full of episodes which became well-known Lucy Maud set pieces some years later. Even though there’s a lot that is really sentimental about this story (I find this to be the case when she lets a MAN be the lead character – a romantic man, that is. Think of the offensive stupidity of Kilmeny and his stupid sexist romantic longings. The guy’s a boob, a vain boob. It’s much better, I think, when Lucy Maud has the woman be the lead character – whether or not it’s first person narratioin or no … It just seems to come out of her with much more ease. My opinion, but I’m stickin’ to it. I get annoyed with her male characters when they’re in love – only NOT when the point-of-view is from the female. I am never annoyed with Gilbert Blythe’s love for Anne, his courting of her, his feelings for her. But if she had written the story from his point of view – I might have been. Anyhoo.)
The story is this: Alan Douglas is a young minister who is new to the town of Rexton. And apparently – just from the way Lucy Maud describes him – the dude is movie-star gorgeous. Of course. But the story opens with him having trouble working on this one sermon – and he suddenly feels really cooped up. Like he needs a break. Like Rexton, with its neat orchards and trim homes, is too domestic for him. So he goes for a long walk – through the woods – and then out onto the lake shore.
Along the way he basically runs into Lynde Oliver (the first encounter is the excerpt below). She, naturally, is the most beautiful woman in the world – but that’s not why he’s gobsmacked by her – oh no!! It’s because he’s never seen her in church before. Why doesn’t she come to church???? He becomes obsessed with the matter. Get a life, jagoff. But I digress. He asks his housekeeper who is gossipy and knows everything – and for some reason that entire family doesn’t go to church and Lynde’s father, a retired sea captain, is a fierce atheist and has literally thrown missionaries and tract-peddlers off his property. So now they’re left alone.
But Alan cannot get that face out of his mind!!!! So he goes back!
And a “friendship” develops – but honestly, there is so little humor between these two, all they do is be tormented and vaguely mysterious, with their matinee idol good looks, that I think: You two bores are welcome to each other.
Don’t get me wrong – the writing is good. Lucy Maud has found her stride. It is recognizable Lucy Maud here. But I am not sure that there is one funny moment in this whole story – and her stories suffer when she goes that way. (Think Kilmeny).
But here’s the excerpt.
Excerpt from Along the Shore
With a half guilty glance at the futile sermon, he took his hat and went out. The sun of the cool spring evening was swinging low over the lake as he turned into the unfrequented, deep-rutted road leading to the shore. It was two miles to the lake, but half way there Alan came to where another road branched off and struck down through the pines in a northeasterly direction. He had sometimes wondered where it led but he had never explored it. Now he had a sudden whim to do so and turned into it. It was even rougher and lonelinr than the other; between the ruts the grasses grew long and thickly; sometimes the pine boughs met overhead; again, the trees broke away to reveal wonderful glimpses of gleaming water, purple islets, dark feathery coasts. Still, the road seemed to lead nowhere and Alan was half repenting the impulse which had led him to choose it when he suddenly came out from the shadow of the pines and found himself gazing on a sight which amazed him.
Before him was a small peninsula running out into the lake and terminating in a long sandy point. Beyond it was a glorious sweep of sunset water. The peninsula itself seemed barren and sandy, covered for the most part with scrub firs and spruces, through which the narrow road wound on to what was the astonishing feature in the landscape – a grey and weather-beaten house built almost at the extremity of the point and shadowed from the western light by a thick plantation of tall pines behind it.
It was the house which puzzled Alan. He had never known there was any house near the lake shore – had never heard mention made of any; yet here was one, and one which was evidently occupied, for a slender spiral of smoke was curling upward from it on the chilly spring air. It could not be a fisherman’s dwelling, for it was large and built after a quaint tasteful design. The longer Alan looked at it the more his wonder grew. The people living here were in the bounds of his congregation. How then was it that he had never seen or heard of them?
He sauntered slowly down the road until he saw that it led directly to the house and ended in the yard. Then he turned off in a narrow path to the shore. He was not far from the house now and he scanned it observantly as he went past. The barrens swept almost up to its door in front but at the side, sheltered from the lake winds by the pines, was a garden where there was a fine show of gay tuliips and golden daffodils. No living creature was visible, and, in spite of the blossoming geraniums and muslin curtains at the windows and the homely spiral of smoke, the place had a lonely, almost untenanted, look.
When Alan reached the shore he found that it was of a much more open and less rocky nature than the part which he had been used to frequent. The beach was of sand and the scrub barrens dwindled down to it almost insensibly. To right and left fir-fringed points ran out into the lake, shaping a little cove with the house in its curve.
Alan walked slowly towards the left headland, intending to follow the shore around to the other road. As he passed the point he stopped short in astonishment. The second surprise and mystery of the evening confronted him.
A little distance away a girl was standing – a girl who turned a startled face at his unexpected appearance. Alan Douglas had thought he knew all the girls in Rexton, but this lithe, glorious creature was a stranger to him. She stood with her hand on the head of a huge, tawny collie dog; another dog was sitting on his haunches beside her.
She was tall, with a great braid of shining chestnut hair, showing ruddy burnished tints where the sunlight struck it, hanging over her shoulder. The plain dark dress she wore emphasized the grace and strength of her supple form. Her face was oval and pale, with straight black brows and a finely cut crimson mouth – a face whose beauty bore the indefinable stamp of race and breeding mingled wiht a wild sweetness, as of a flower growing in some lonely and inaccessible place. None of the Rexton girls looked like that. Who, in the name of all that was amazing, could she be?
As the thought crossed Alan’s mind the girl turned, with an air of indifference that might have seemed slightly overdone to a calmer observer than was the young minister at that moment and, with a gesture of command to her dogs, walked quickly away into the scrub spruces. She was so tall that her uncovered head was visible over them as she followed some winding footpath, and Alan stood like a man rooted to the ground until he saw her enter the grey house. Then he went homeward in a maze, all thought of sermons, doctrinal or otherwise, for the moment knocked out of his head.
How I enjoy seeing precursors to an author’s more famous works in their earliest books. Patrick O’Brian did that with “The Golden Ocean” and “The Unknown Shore”, two sea-novels based on real events that predate the Aubrey-Maturin books’ setting by about a century. (And which he wrote 15 years before “Master and Commander”, too.) You can see several elements that became mythic in the later series.
My favorite story about these books is that O’Brian started and finished “The Golden Ocean” in six weeks, almost as a lark, after finishing a long and difficult “serious” novel. It always made me happy to know that he made his name and fortune doing something that came easily and that he loved, historical fiction, as opposed to critic-pleasing “modern” stuff.