Pat of Silver Bush, by L. M. Montgomery

Rating: 9/10

Aaand the L. M. Montgomery spree continues...

This is going to be a long, rambling post, so if you don't like rambles, especially fanciful ones, you'd better skip it, because I'm going to post it regardless! :)

Pat Gardiner loves her family's farm and home, Silver Bush, more than any place she's ever been and wants nothing more than to stay there, with everything in it always the same. She loves her family, friends, and home fiercely and tries her hardest to keep them unaltered. But change is fated to come, and Pat must cope with it.

I really enjoyed this. I love the descriptions of Silver Bush-the fields, trees, orchard, graveyard, garden. I love Judy Plum and her wise, wonderful way of talking; her supposedly Irish vernacular actually does not hinder the flow of the story, but adds to her likeableness (is that a word...? I think not). I always like housekeeper/cook characters like her. There's just something about them...like Rebecca Dew (Anne of Windy Poplars) and Susan Baker (Anne's House of Dreams through Rilla of Ingleside).

Pat herself is delightful, and I sympathize with her so much, with the way she wants things to stay the same. She learns to deal with it well, for example growing to love her new baby sister when at first she dreaded her birth; when Pat goes for a three-week visit to her aunt's, unwillingly: "This is just a visit. I'll soon be home again...in just twenty-one days," she reminded herself bravely. Pat is very dependable herself, and very good at loving people and things to the utmost.

I would've liked to be a little more introduced to Pat's family-their looks and personalities. There seemed to be a smaller cast of secondary characters in this book, or at least, they were less prominent. About Pat's mother: "Mother never showed what she felt." Sometimes I wish I could be that way! But, really, I don't think I do wish to be that way. Only to have the ability when I want it, maybe.

' "I knew they could never have the soul of Silver Bush. That would always be mine." ' Montgomery always has sentences like this in her books. She knew that places and things do have character, depending on who is looking at them, who loves/hates them, and what has happened in or to them.

I like the way Pat names things on Silver Bush. It never occurred to me to do that. Naming things does make them like people, and really alive! Montgomery really makes me more aware of my surroundings.
On inspiration I named some things in my backyard and house:
* Japanese maple with reddish-orange leaves: the Wednesday Woman
* Tall fir tree next to it: Lord Fir. I have less than a month to enjoy him before he becomes this year's Christmas tree :(
* Sprawling, rough, green tree with many, randomly-placed arms: Progo (the tree reminds me of the 'cherub' in L'Enle's A Wind in the Door)
* Lone maple tree- Aching Bess. She's been 'trimmed' (butchered) and so is longing, aching, for her reaching branches again. When they grow in she will just be Bess.
* Camellia bush in neighbor's yard: the Bush of Happily Ever After. The way the evening sun falls on it, is bewitching. It makes me think of all my favorite books and their happy endings.
* Huge tree with abundant red leaves in summer/spring, in another neighbor's yard, facing ours: the Tree of Time. This tree looks so wise, as if it has seen so much and has always been; I don't know if it's male or female. If someone cuts it down, look out!
In my living room:
* Baby grand piano: Olga
* Mini cactus: Floyd
* Blue, oriental-patterned wing chair: Timothy
* Yellow and blue-print chair and hassock: Wendy
* Big yellow curtains: left one is Deb, right one is Dina
* White china cat: Prissa
* Old black couch with thin white stripes: Sid
* Tall floor lamp: Lois
* Mantel clock: Esther. She has been in our family since the year the Titanic sunk. The things she must have seen!
* Little green-leafed plant whose scientific name I don't know: Lucy

Not very imaginative names, maybe, but it was fun to think of them. When I looked at the objects, the names just popped into my head and could be nothing else. I love books that cause me to imagine all kinds of things!

Okay, back to more things I liked about this book, if you don't think I'm a nut-case yet:

I love the idea of Jingle's 'dream houses'- wouldn't it be fun to imagine them, just the way we want? Houses, especially their interiors, are fascinating to me. Oh, and I like Jingle himself immensely, of course! He's a really interesting character, and Pat brightens his life so much. And he hers.

Montgomery always puts into exquisite wording truths I have always felt; many of the sentences she puts together just make me shiver with their beauty and intrigue. Here are some, with my comments:

'She was pierced by the swift exquisite pang which beauty always gave her...always would give her. It was almost anguish while it lasted...but the pain was heavenly.'  Who hasn't felt this, when looking at a gorgeous sunset,or moonlight, etc?

'Pat felt herself a sister to all the loveliness of the world. If only everybody could feel this secret, satisfying rapture!'   Pat thinks this while outside, on a moonlit night.

'A street where the wind could only creep in a narrow space like a cringing, fettered thing, instead of sweeping grandly over wide fields and great salt wastes of sea.'   *shiver*

'The old loyalties of home were still potent.'

'The big white house with its background of sapphire water, where there was a coloured, fir-scented garden, full of wind music and bee song, that dipped in terraces to the harbour shore and was always filled with the sound of "perilous seas forlorn." '     It seems that in almost every book LMM quotes this line of Keats' 'Ode to a Nightingale'. It's a beautiful quote- 'perilous seas in fairylands forlorn'. Doesn't that just give you shivers?

'He was thinking...of the house. He could see it...He could almost see its lights gleaming through the dusk of some land "beyond the hills and far away." '

'Hilary (Jingle's real name) was waiting in Happiness, sitting on an old mossy stone by the spring that the years had never touched.'

'Why, Pat wondered, did lovely thing so often hurt?'    Why, indeed? It's such an unfathomable mystery and truth.

Too many lovely sentences to list here! Montgomery writes about quite ordinary situations, if indeed anything is truly ordinary, but she makes them fascinating and exciting; her books read like fantasy, without the...fantasy.

Sometimes it's like Pat's my twin! When told she must go to Queen's Academy and study for a teacher's license, she tells Judy: "I don't seem to be like other girls, Judy. They all want to go to college and have a career. I don't...I just want to stay at Silver Bush and help you and mother."
That's the way I recently felt! I didn't want to go to college, but stay home and help my parents, maybe get a job while living at home. Now I'm reconciled to college...sort of :)
Pat is a 'kindred spirit', as Anne would say.

LMM has an uncanny knack of making me dislike, even despise, the 'beaus' of her heroines that don't end up lasting. Harris and Lester-ugh! Suffocating. But Jingle...!

Again, this book emphasized looks too much for my liking, but I really couldn't care less because the rest more than makes up for that.

When her characters grow up there's always sadness accompanying it, just the fact of them growing up along with other things. Sometimes 'losing the way to fairyland'. I hope I never lose that! Or maybe I already have...

I love LMM's love stories...her stories in general. They make me feel warm and happy inside, as do the books of Shannon Hale and many others. I don't necessarily look for reality in books, but for that warm, happy feeling. No stuffy professor of literature will ever bring me away from that or convince me that 'great works of literature' are the only worthwhile books to be read. Never!
Montgomery's endings always give me 'that thrill'. The last sentences or so are always just right, and haunting. There is no one like LMM! The same could be said of my other favorite authors.

I'm tempted to immediately read the sequel, but I believe I will read the sequel to The Story Girl, The Golden Road, first. Ahh, it's the best of all things to have so many LMM books yet to read!

I promise I will never write such a long post again, unless I cannot help it. I just had to let out the torrent of feeling Pat of Silver Bush brought in me.

Sometimes I think that stories/books are beyond the author's control or influence, and the authors are only the mediums through which they are told.

Okay, I'll shut up now. My word, that was long.