impulsereader | Beauty by Robin McKinley (Reply)

Beauty and the Beast is stalking me. I think it feels neglected, and I can’t really blame it. This means that last Friday night we saw a production of it in which the eldest niece played Gaston’s sidekick rather than the chandelier and other various bits - double cast switched on alternate performances. Considering the age of the children involved the production was just about as accomplished and spotty in quality as you can imagine. DressedUp!Beast was the spitting image of how Hugh Hefner would have been costumed if he’d had a bit part in Saturday Night Fever – with doc martinish boots to complete the look. Select pics at the end of the entry.

Also, I suspect my KR *waves hello - don’t be scared of this entry, it’s nothing as silly as fanfic* has been lurking around the beginnings of this journal and that is possibly why I read and he computered to the backdrop of a pretty terrible – possibly Disney – Word just auto capitalized Disney – I hate that a little bit – B&tB take off with Neil Patrick Harris and Peter Krauss in bit parts on Sunday.

Well, B&tB, I was already ahead of you. I’d started Beauty sometime last week and was finishing as that fairly horrible movie played, so there!

This is a very practical book, and I think it is so very practical because Beauty herself is a very practical character. Aside from declaring she’d rather be called Beauty than Honour (her father fails spectacularly at explaining the concept of honour which prompts this decision) at a very young age, she is practically the personification of practicality. Side note – McKinley uses British spellings, but she’s American and (I believe) was living in America when she wrote this. She didn’t move to England until much later when she wrote Rose Daughter. This, as well as the Sherlock fic I've been writing - I changed my spellcheck dictionary - is why I found myself using it in this entry.

Beauty, to hear her tell it, isn’t very beautiful. Her sisters, Grace and Hope, have inherited all the beauty in this family. We get the usual of Life in the City is wonderful and awesome as we are Rich and Important. Beauty is a little less impressed as she voluntarily relegates herself to a life of hermit-like scholarship due to the fact that she sees herself as much less attractive than her sisters.

So Grace, the eldest daughter becomes engaged to Robby, a Captain due to set sail on one of her father’s ships. There is talk of them marrying beforehand since the journey is scheduled to take three years, but everyone is extraordinarily honourable so a chivalrous engagement is the result. Time passes, and just before Disaster comes upon them, Hope confides to Beauty that she is in love with a lesser sort of employee of their father. Beauty very practically assures her that their father wants only her happiness and that after these business troubles have passed she will be happy to reconcile her father to this uneven match. McKinley establishes here that Beauty, as the youngest, is expected to have a bit more sway with Dad than the other sisters.

Enter disaster as is inevitable. Ships are presumed lost - Robby along with them - riches down the drain.

Here is the real surprise if we’re judging entirely on the B&tB myth. Our family is saved by the unofficial intended of the middle daughter. On a purely literary geeky level, this should cause a very serious reaction of - WHAT? - where the heck does this guy come from? Answer - nowhere - he is so far completely unprecedented. It’s actually quite the turn-around here, the sisters being engaged to men who aren’t callous noblemen who abandon them at the first sign of trouble.

So, anyway, favoured potential mate of Hope enters the scene. Ger - terrible name, short for something - relates that in preparation for marrying Hope he has established that a village near his home town is in need of a blacksmith, and he has secured a small house. He offers to take the entire family with him, trying his best not to make Hope feel obligated in return to follow through and marry him because he’s doing all this rescuing. Side note - cute couple here. Everyone is very grateful and we proceed through the auctioning of possessions and then travel into the country. Side note – the friends of our family in the City are a lot nicer in this story than any other source so far. Beauty is even gifted with a valuable horse.

McKinley isn’t in a hurry in either of her B&tB stories to get to the Beast. We get lots of detail about our family setting up shop and settling into their new home. As in Rose Daughter our sisters find they aren’t really all the bummed about giving up on being Rich and Important in the City, they’re pretty happy in their new life. A year on we see our cute couple exchange vows and bedrooms are swapped around.

So now we get down to it, and news of our Father’s returned ship comes in. Here there is some added suspense because there is the possibility that it is Robby – for whom Grace is still pining – also returned safely. Dad makes the journey back and, in this version, actually makes out relatively well; he arrives not long after the ship and is able to sell the contents as well as the ship so he can pay the sailors who made it home and he has a little bit left over.

We learn a little later that the ‘request’ bit of our formula went down with the elder sisters jokingly requesting jewels and Beauty genuinely requesting rose seeds for the garden. Dad made some other purchases in town but wasn’t able to obtain any rose seeds. This leads him to, after his night in the Beast’s enchanted castle, pluck a rose on his way out. Cue enraged Beast. Hilariously, the description of the Beast’s clothing here distinctly reminded me of the Hugh Hefner retro look that was featured in the kids’ play last week.

This is all standard, either Dad returns and will be killed or one of his daughters comes of her own free will and the Beast will not harm her. He has a month to return and all he has to do is ride into the forest – which local legend holds to be enchanted – and get ‘lost’ to come back to the castle. Oh, and we do get the ‘riches for your daughter’ point as Dad’s saddlebags are loaded down with things he didn’t put in there. Later we get the Beast sheepishly admitting he didn’t want to send money, he tried to pick useful and beautiful goods instead so there are good beeswax candlesticks and linen tablecloths, a vase etc. The Beast even sends each daughter a little box with her initial on it, the other sisters contain the jewels they jokingly requested from Dad while Beauty’s is full of rose seeds. This leads Beauty to declare that he has a sense of humour so she’ll surely get along with him just fine.

So Beauty takes up residence in the castle and her horse takes up residence in the stables. Her days are at first spent riding or walking the grounds before supping with the Beast.

Here is where it gets really interesting. McKinley gives us a proper courtship between Beauty and the Beast. This was distinctly lacking in Rose Daughter, and does seem to be in the originals as well. Here, though, the Beast introduces Beauty to his library – which is absolutely fabulous because it contains every book which will ever be written, which causes Beauty a bit of consternation when she tries to read, along with Browning, (wait for it) Sherlock Holmes! – and our lovers begin a daily ritual of reading aloud to each other.

This is where I’m seeing similarities to OUAT Skin Deep and the fic that’s out there. It is the courtship between Rumpelstilskin and Belle that the fans are filling in. I still wish the writers hadn’t thrown in that line about her having had a few months to look around. I hate that they limited it like that. So many adventures for these two characters could exist within that time frame.

The castle is once again presented as a character unto itself, here the servants have become invisible beings which can make themselves felt in different ways. Beauty’s attendants chivvy her along as a little breeze might and eventually she can make out some of the chatter of the dinnerware as it competes for her attention.

The Beast does propose each night after dinner, but not a huge deal is made of it in this story. It’s mentioned a few times but doesn’t get the ritualistic treatment it does in other versions where we see him solemnly intone it each and every evening. This Beast is actually pretty easy going as Beasts go. He has a great sense of humour and we get to see it quite often.

Right. So Beauty is homesick. The Beast reveals that he can show her what’s going on at home, and she jumps at the chance. She gets to see her sisters discussing the fact that the local minister is looking to begin courting Grace. She then gets a bonus vision of Robby’s ship coming into harbour. Dilemma – it will take word of Robby’s arrival/Robby himself much too long to reach Grace. Beauty is convinced that if she allows the minister to begin courting her she will not cry off even if the man she still loves eventually shows up.

She assures the Beast she will never again ask to leave the castle, but this one time she really must because her sister’s happiness depends upon it. The traditional week is given as well as the rose and the news that if she doesn’t come back the Beast will die because he cannot live without her anymore. Beauty leaves immediately.

So here’s where I found a bit of a sticking point. Apparently Beauty’s time spent in the enchanted castle has made her taller, changed her hair and eye colour, and generally made her more beautiful. I wish that being beautiful in the eyes of the Beast would have made her realize that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Oh well, I didn’t write it.

Over the course of the week spent with her family, Beauty finds herself repeatedly defending the Beast, and she comes to two realizations; she doesn’t really belong here with her family anymore, and she is in love with the Beast. Still, she allows herself to be talked into staying one night more than she probably should. This results in her having a very hard time getting back to the castle because the Beast thinks she isn’t coming back and has – I guess given up on life and is therefore dying – this whole ‘I’ll die if you don’t’ come back’ point generally has to be hand-waved a bit so we’ll hand-wave and move on.

Beauty’s declaration of love causes the Beast to revert back to his human form, the castle comes alive to celebrate the wedding of its King and Queen, and all of Beauty’s family is arrived in great state and all their finery to join them. Happily ever after.

I was glad to come back to this book, and I enjoyed it a lot this time around. I was struck by how different it is from the rest of McKinley’s work. It feels very compact to me after the rich mosaic of Rose Daughter. Rose Daughter is a stained glass window, flooding everything around it with jewel tones. Beauty is a prism which must be held up to the light to produce a focused rainbow.

So the town in our production even had a group of nuns! Just like Storybrooke! There are a few of them behind Belle & Gaston - I didn't notice them in time to get a really good pic.