Mommy, I Want A Pony!

My Friend Flicka by Mary O'Hara; +6; Literary Fiction; Carrie at We Read to Know We Are Not Alone

In the interests of full disclosure, I must tell you that I did not technically read this book. Many, many years ago, my mother read it to me. Every night, for several weeks, she would read to me just before I went to bed.

To be even more honest, I really only have a clear memory of the beginning of the book.

The beginning; all was good in my world. I had my awesome mother reading me a story that she loved. The main character had a bad relationship with his father. His father was distant, domineering and either unconcerned with his son's feeling or incapable or understanding them. Given my opinion of my own father at the time, I was just giddy to see an “accurate” representation of Fathers. I don't remember if I ever said anything about that to mom.

Speaking of moms, the main character's mother was pretty much perfect; rather as I thought of my own mother at the time.

Oh, and there was a horse. Yes, the boy at the center of the story was in rather desperately in want of a horse of his very own. He gets the horse, loves the horse and finally lets the horse go. There's also a bit about a cougar and also something about at thunderstorm. It's a whole big metaphor or growing up; or whatever.

All the subplots and subtexts aside, because of when this book came through my life, it'll always be about the mother and the father.

As much as the father is distant and, frankly, cruel the main character craves his attention, affection and approval. As marvelous and reliable as the mother is, the main character treats her as a throw-away; he mostly ignores, or tires to ignore, her. He can only be himself, be free when, he moves beyond them.

Oh, well. What do you know? I guess it is a whole big metaphor for growing up, after all.

Or whatever.

Note on Structure

This is supposed to be a one-post-per-day Monday-Saturday thing, but then I fell behind. There will be no playing catch-up. If I miss a day, I miss a day. I won't do extra posts to make up for it.

Sex Pigs?

Lord of the Flies; William Golding; Literary Fiction; +10; Lucy Snider at Look What I Found In My Brain!

There was a lot of sex involved in my reading of this novel.

No, no, I didn't have a lot of sex while I was reading it... Neither meaning of that, actually.

No, but reading a book about a group of violent young boys seems to make girls talk a lot about sex. Short version: turns out most of us would rather do Jack than Ralph. Even in fiction, nice guys finish last.

There's also a lot of weird sex stuff going on in the book. Aside from Piggy's sexual fixation on Ralph and Roger's sexual fixation on Jack, and Ralph and Jack's perverse and ultimately mutually destructive inarticulate, violent attempt at courtship, there's the whole thing with the pigs.

When Jack's band hunts and kills the sow... It's gang rape. The enthusiastic, crazed, myopic boys, frustrated and possessed of an excess of energy, chase, bring down and impale, repeatedly, the only female creature they've encountered. As if that weren't enough violent, sexual imagery on its own, Golding makes a point of spicing things up with descriptions of the panting and the squealing done by boy and sow alike. He also has an extremely graphic description of one of the boys' spears (subtle, I know) entering the sow's anus. Yes, it really was that gross.

Not long after the sow-hunting/gang-bang scene, we get the fainting at the sight of the dead pig, enacted by one of the more frail members of the tribe. I always thought it sounded like a variation the Oedipal complex. The pig has already been established as a metaphor for the sexual female, but this pig also issues condemnations and proclamations of its omniscience. Also, the pig is a source of nourishment. It just always screamed “fear of the sexualized mother,” to me.