Book review, Northanger Abbey

This was the last Austen novel I hadn't read, so I thought it was time.  It's definitely my least favorite, but that only puts it last among greats.  The characters are just not as vibrant as her later creations.  The heroine, Catherine Morland, is something of a mouse with no notable traits other than an overactive imagination due to her reading of gothic novels.  Henry Tilney is amusing, in one sense a typical Austen male lead in that he is of the highest character and sees the virtue in our heroine.  He's also got a bit of Mr. Bennet about him, in that he is more of a bemused observer of the human foibles around him than he is a manly actor like Mr. Darcy or Mr. Knightley.  Partly this befits his status as a country parson rather than master of a large estate.

The villains, the Thorp siblings, are less convincing than their equivalents in the other novels, e.g., Wickham and the Crawford siblings of Mansfield Park.  Austen is more subtle when we meet them in conveying the bad character of those than she is here with the Thorps.  Isabella and John are fairly transparently awful from the get-go, despite Catherine's failure to see so immediately.  Just about the only character with much depth is General Tilney, whose nature is something of a mystery until the end.

The writing is as always very good, and the social observations keen.  There are some fourth wall breaks which strike the modern reader as unusual or postmodern, though it wasn't actually that uncommon at the time for authors to take asides to talk directly to the reader.  Austen for instance at one point notes that the reader will have seen that there are just a few pages left so clearly she had better wrap things up.  At another she notes that the time she has allotted for one character to relate a large amount of information to another isn't really sufficient given the distance she has given them to walk and talk.  She brushes the concern aside, saying something like, well let's just assume he wrote some of it to her in a letter at some other time.  It's a striking nod to the artifice of the fictional construct. The entire ending is the purest deus ex machina, which is partly due to the nature of Northanger Abbey as a parody of the Gothic novel.

Image chosen for general hilarity.  The bad girl in the middle is the exact opposite of Catherine Morland.  The right cover is from a 1960s paperback, trying to sell Northanger Abbey as an actual Gothic horror novel instead of a parody of one

PRK Journal, Week 7

There hasn't been much change in the last couple of weeks.  Each eye still has some ghosting, a second faint image above and to the right of the main image.  This is the result of astigmatism, which is an asphericity of the cornea which prevents it from focusing a single image precisely on the retina.  In the Day 6 report I mentioned a test at the doctor's office which involved looking through a pinhole and seeing a clear image, in contrast to what was still very blurry vision sans pinhole.  That's an astigmatism test.  The pinhole takes away any ghost images because only a small part of the cornea is getting an image in the first place.  

At any rate, the astigmatism and resulting ghosting should go away as the cornea continues to heal.  In other PRK recovery accounts I've read, ghosting starts to go away in week 5 or 6.   However a factor in my case may be the use of steroid drops, whose purpose is to slow healing down.  Others report that they see noticeable improvement in vision when the steroid drops are discontinued.  Frequently that's a month or two after surgery.  For whatever reason, my doc has me continuing the drops for four months after surgery.  Four drops per day the first month, three the second (where I am now), etc.  So my improvement may be correspondingly slower.  There's no reason yet to worry that it won't arrive at the right place eventually.

PRK Journal, Week 5

It has felt like I've hit a vision plateau over the last two weeks, with little or no improvement.  Just some minor ups and downs.  I am fully functional, but not at my pre-surgery level with glasses.  I have begun to notice some ghosting, a fainter secondary image slightly off of the primary image.  That leads to blurring when reading at distance.  When I stare at a difficult target for a few seconds, I'm able to differentiate the two and finally read it, but it's quite different than normal sharp vision.  As I've said in previous posts, this surgery has emphasized to me that vision is a complicated eye/brain process, the subtleties of which are not nearly encompassed by a single acuity measurement.

Today I had my last followup appointment until six months from now when both eyes should be settled at their final level.  The bottom line is that my right (distance) eye is somewhere between 20/25 and 20/30, and my left (reading) eye is at 20/50.  Something of interest I probably should have put in the first post is that pre-surgery the right eye was at -4.00 diopters and the left eye was at -6.50.  Today the doctor said it generally takes on the order of one month per diopter to fully stabilize, so there are still a couple of months of improvement to come (recall that the left eye is purposely being left about a diopter short for reading purposes).  The scan revealed a small remaining astigmatism on the right eye which should smooth out with time.  He's still confident that that eye is on target for 20/20.  The left eye has a larger remaining astigmatism, and still a prominent epithelial ridge.  This is where the regrowing cells collide and form a sort of temporary epithelial Himalayas over the center of the pupil.  He was surprised that I'm able to read as well as I can with that eye right now.  When the ridge is beaten down by a few more weeks of blinking action, he said the reading should get much sharper.

If anyone is carefully reading these, they'll have noticed that my system of estimating acuity is, charitably, way off.  Neither eye is at 20/20 in reality, and the left eye isn't even close.  Perhaps I've been unconsciously biasing the results by convincing myself I can see the legs of the m in "Brahm's Lullaby" at distances where I can't quite.   And maybe my daughter was being more strict with herself when she claimed she could only make it out at 150 inches when using my standard she'd be more like 180 or something.  At any rate, I've altered the scale of the measurements so that today I'm at 20/27.5 on the right eye.  Unfortunately that adjustment leaves the left eye at 20/29, which again is way off what the pros measured today.  Perhaps another possibility is that the improvement will consist more in the time it takes to resolve the m at distance (currently several seconds) than in changing the distance itself.  Regardless, the exercise has been valuable in determining whether things are getting better, worse, or staying the same.

Other notes: the doctor saw a small amount of corneal haze today, which again is normal and should clear up.  He reiterated the need for sunglasses through the summer, which I've been following.  He also gave me a DVD of my surgery, which I'll watch at some point and maybe post here.

Steroid drops continue for the next three months, tapering off as we go.  Currently I'm to continue it three times a day, losing a drop per day per month.  The drops are $42 a bottle which lasts about two weeks at the current rate.  That's $8/gram, which is only about a sixth the price of gold, so what am I complaining about.

PRK Journal, Day 28

It's now been nearly a month since the surgery.  The last week has been pretty steady, with actually a small decline, especially in the left (reading) eye.  It's nothing that has kept me from from doing any normal activities, just a little loss in sharpness.  There's still supposed to be some fluctuations in the course toward the final corrected vision, so I'm not too concerned.  Hope it improves though.

Reading and computer work is all fine and normal now.