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