The Pathfinder
Jan. 30th, 2010 07:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
purplecatI did a meme about this time last year which involved posting the first line from books and asking your flist to guess the book. One of the books I picked, more or less at random, was The Pathfinder by J. Fenimore Cooper. I'd bought it as a teenager in a fit of enthusiasm for Last of the Mohicans by the same author but I'd never managed to get into it. I thought maybe I should give it another go.
Obviously early 19th century novels are written in a very different style to modern novels. In particular, to a certain extent they are written to take a while. Even given that, I felt this one dragged which is fatal to something intended essentially as an action-adventure romance.
In the end I think the central problem is a combination of two characters, the Pathfinder himself and the heroine's uncle, the seafaring Cap. They are both "peculiar" and dogmatic. We are clearly intended to admire the Pathfinder and the simple clarity of his thought while, at the same time, finding Cap's dogmatism amusing. However when they get into a conversation and sit there talking at each other, generally at length, even about essentially relevant and gripping subjects such as whether one of their company is a traitor, their combined homespun speechifying gets quite wearing.
Beyond that it's a nice, if not spectacular, novel. Derring is done. The French and the Iroquois are dastardly (or actually not so much, the Pathfinder is just inclined to think they are). The English and the Delaware are noble. It even just about scrapes past the Bechdel test (it contains two women, who while they have several conversations about men, do occasionally have conversations about their situation and how to handle it - albeit their situation is largely caused by men). In fact it's morality is, on the whole, a lot less objectionable than you might expect for an adventure novel written in 1840 about the American frontier.
I won't be reading it again though.
Obviously early 19th century novels are written in a very different style to modern novels. In particular, to a certain extent they are written to take a while. Even given that, I felt this one dragged which is fatal to something intended essentially as an action-adventure romance.
In the end I think the central problem is a combination of two characters, the Pathfinder himself and the heroine's uncle, the seafaring Cap. They are both "peculiar" and dogmatic. We are clearly intended to admire the Pathfinder and the simple clarity of his thought while, at the same time, finding Cap's dogmatism amusing. However when they get into a conversation and sit there talking at each other, generally at length, even about essentially relevant and gripping subjects such as whether one of their company is a traitor, their combined homespun speechifying gets quite wearing.
Beyond that it's a nice, if not spectacular, novel. Derring is done. The French and the Iroquois are dastardly (or actually not so much, the Pathfinder is just inclined to think they are). The English and the Delaware are noble. It even just about scrapes past the Bechdel test (it contains two women, who while they have several conversations about men, do occasionally have conversations about their situation and how to handle it - albeit their situation is largely caused by men). In fact it's morality is, on the whole, a lot less objectionable than you might expect for an adventure novel written in 1840 about the American frontier.
I won't be reading it again though.