Green Mansions
by W. H. Hudson is a classic. It is considered to be one of those works you
have to read at some point. And I admit that it gripped me when I read it, and
it was beautifully written.
As I writer, I could recognize numerous problems with the
structure of the story, which other writers even contemporaneous with W. H.
Hudson would have avoided. The main problem was that it had no closure. It
reached a climax, and the climax was extremely vivid. Then after the climax,
the narrator just fell apart into depression, stumbled about, and the story
ended. This went on for 25 very long pages after the climax. Some of it was
very good—especially the image of the white moth doing the same thing that the
young woman Rima did—but for the most part it was just heavy depression.
The structure of the story was that the original narrator
got a Venezuelan, Mr. Abel, to tell the story he had kept secret all his life.
Most of the novel is Abel’s first person account. This makes Green Mansions a double-first-person
structure. Briefly, Abel recounted the old man’s story, making it a
triple-first-person for a brief period. This would be fine except that, at the
end, as I said, there was no closure: there was nothing about any conversation
or parting between the author and Abel.
Having such a closure would have solved at least two
problems. First, the events in the story were so much like a fantasy—the young
woman Rima (flitting around in a skirt of spider silk) seemed too ethereal to
be a real person, too good, too naïve, too nimble, which made me think that
maybe Abel had imagined her. Abel claimed to have brought Rima’s bones with him
in a jar (sorry I had to spoil that). He could have shown the jar to the
narrator who, looking inside, would have found it empty. Or not. Anyway, Hudson
could have done something with that for a really good ending.
Second, during the long depressing end, Abel told the
author about how he had concluded that God either did not exist or was evil. I,
like many readers of this blog, found this interesting; but it was just a long
rant. How much more interesting it would have been if Abel had told the author
what he thought, and the author might have probed and questioned him on it. I
believe this is what H. G. Wells would have done.
I want to include here some of the vivid passages that
the new atheist Abel spoke. I will repeat them here largely without judgment.
They are just vivid, that’s all.
Abel imagined speaking with Rima before she perished in
the fire (sorry I had to spoil that): “To me was your cry; but your poor, frail
fellow-creature was not there to save, or, failing that, to cast himself into
the flames with you, hating God.”
Then he continued (in these fragments from the next
twenty pages). “Thus, in my insufferable pain, I spoke aloud; alone in that
solitary place, a bleeding fugitive in the dark night, looking up at the stars
I cursed the Author of my being and called on Him to take back the abhorred
gift of life.
“Yet, according to my philosophy, how vain it was! All my
bitterness and hatred and defiance were as empty, as ineffectual, as utterly
futile, as are the supplications of the meek worshiper, and no more than the
whisper of a leaf, the light whir of an insect’s wing…when I thanked Him on my
knees for guiding me to where I had heard so sweet and mysterious a melody, or
hated and defied Him as now, it all came from Him—love and hate, good and evil…though
my cries did not touch nor come near Him they would yet hurt me; and, just as a prisoner maddened at
his unjust fate beats against the stone walls of his cell until he falls back
bruised and bleeding on the floor, so did I wilfully bruise my own soul, and
knew that those wounds I gave myself would not heal.
“For no reaction, or submission, had followed on that
furious revolt against the unknown being, personal or not, that is behind
nature, in whose existence I believed. I was still in revolt: I would hate Him,
and show my hatred by being like Him, as He appears to us reflected in that
mirror of Nature. Had he given me good gifts—the sense of right and wrong and
sweet humanity? The beautiful sacred flower He had caused to grow in me I would
crush ruthlessly; its beauty and fragrance and grace would be dead forever;
there was nothing evil, nothing cruel and contrary to my nature, that I would
not be guilty of, glorying in my guilt.
“For they were all dead at last, old and young, all who
had lighted the fire round that great green tree in which Rima had taken
refuge, who had danced round the blaze, shouting, ‘Burn! Burn!’
“That is my philosophy still: prayers, austerities, good
works—they avail nothing, and there is no intercession, and outside of the soul
there is no forgiveness in heaven or earth for sin.”
Green Mansions is one of those novels that is so gripping
and flawed that I fantasize that someday I will write my own version of it. Or
not.
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