Jane Austen in Scotland

This week I finished Val McDermid's retelling of Northanger Abbey while watching a gray September rain and nursing an upset stomach. It actually wasn't a bad way to spend time (other than the upset stomach) because Ms. McDermid's Northanger, with its Scottish setting and teenage girls enthralled by supernatural lore, was made for just such an occasion. As you've realized by now, I'm a big fan of Jane Austen, and while you might think that would make me leery of any latter-day attempts to spin her, I've found that in general her material holds up quite well in a number of different hands.

I understand that this book was a bit of a departure for the author, who specializes in crime fiction and suspense. In Ms. McDermid's hands, Northanger Abbey becomes much more like what I would call a young adult novel than Austen's ever was. To some degree this may speak of the difference in maturity between a teenager in Austen's time and a teenager today, notwithstanding the fact that Ms. McDermid's Cat Morland is in many ways a levelheaded and exemplary girl. I felt that the story took the viewpoint of its young protagonist sympathetically and without irony--if I hadn't read the original, I would have thought I had picked up a teen novel by mistake.

Cat is a young woman of 17 with all the typical concerns of a teenager on the brink of adulthood, although she does share with many of her peers a fixation on vampires that borders on obsession. I certainly had my own preoccupations as a teenager, though vampires and werewolves weren't among them, and I tried to view Cat and her vampire-crazed friends through the lens of an adult looking back at the rich fantasy life of my own teen years--but I still had trouble finding Cat's difficulty in distinguishing between reality and fantasy believable. It may be that I'm missing the gene that lets people appreciate the supernatural, because I understand that the Twilight series, for example, counts many adult women among its devoted fans--I'm just not among them.

It would be too simplistic to assume that people are attracted to bloodcurdling tales in equal measure to the tranquility and perceived safety of their own lives (though this is very much the case with Cat, a vicar's daughter with a remarkably happy home life). Be that as it may, I usually make my apologies for my own lack of interest in the genre by stating the truth, that I find real life quite scary enough without throwing the supernatural into the mix. I do remember a pre-teen interest in Hitchcockian suspense, the tales of Edgar Allen Poe, séances, and slumber party ghost-telling sessions, but again, I would say none of that is unusual for the age group. In my case, those interests had mostly disappeared by the time I was Cat's age, which is not to say that I was more advanced than other people, but merely that I had left behind any tendency to find romance in horror, if in fact I ever had it.

What I could sympathize with is Cat's proclivity to let her imagination run away with her (just as her predecessor Catherine Morland did in Austen's original) when introduced into a wildly romantic setting with a new group of people quite different from her own work-a-day family. You can see the budding writer at work, using the materials in her new circumstances--an atmospheric, castle-like dwelling, an aristocratic family, a tyrannical father, a romantic attraction--as the building blocks for a story she is trying out in her head. That she woefully misinterprets the circumstances surrounding the death of her new friends' mother years before is not surprising, as her limited knowledge of the world and matters of the heart make this line of thought predictable for someone with an active imagination.

What was less understandable was how Cat could seriously view her new boyfriend and his father as potential vampires and still be willing to go off on her own to visit them in their remote Scottish lair--but I guess this is just me being difficult. Apparently, there are those who would jump at just such an opportunity, and Cat and her friends are among them. If I found Henry Tilney's ability to overlook Cat's silly meddling and tendency to poke into matters beyond her knowing to be remarkably forgiving, I also found Cat's contrition and embarrassment to be convincing. She is sensible underneath it all and probably in need of just such a comedown to begin leaving some of her more girlish preoccupations behind. Her imagination is so full that it sometimes spills over awkwardly into real life; it takes a growing maturity to distinguish fact from fiction.

I enjoyed the updated setting that brought Cat and her friends to Edinburgh for the arts festival (instead of Bath, as in the original). I thought Edinburgh the perfect setting for a budding writer with a love for the Gothic to get both her first taste of a writer's life and to take her first steps toward adulthood. I found myself thinking, "This would make a good series!"--though Cat has grown up enough by the end of the story that the possibility is actually closed off before it can gain traction. It's too bad in a way--Cat poking around in other castles and abbeys of old England could have provided entertainment enough for several more sessions of rainy days.