Sometimes You Have to Give A Second Look

Sometimes You Have to Give  a Second Look /Moonstone

 

It would seem to me that the dated style of the prologue and some of the scrolling exposition in "The Moonstone," would be a major deterrent to a modern audience.  As readers, we are looking for a more interactive experience right away.  In fact, how often do you open a book these days and find a prologue and pages and pages of exposition? A modern audience expects the author to jump right into the action and give us the entrée, we aren’t looking for tapas, and to be frank, I suppose that we are a little spoiled. I appreciate the way that Hemingway left so much of his story telling to subtext.  You got so much of the story by what he wasn’t telling you.  No one likes to be beat over the head with exposition. Lol.  Modern readers want to skip right over the exposition and the rising action.  We want to jump in without dipping our toes in the water. We want to see a climax or something that hooks us right away.  As I read “The Moonstone” and plugged away through the somewhat dry and dragging out of numerous pages of exposition, I traversed a line of endearment and frustration. I had to fight with myself to give the prologue a chance and for that matter, to give old Gabriel Betteredge the opportunity to tell me a story; even if he had to digress here and there and mosey around to get to his point.  It is somewhat of an endearing trait because it seems honest.  If an elderly man were to tell you a story, he might stereotypically get sidetracked here and there making sure you have all the information and backstory you need to understand the current story he is trying to share with you.  In that respect, I found myself liking Betteredge and kind of laughing to myself about the crazy old timer who cannot seem to stay on point.  Mostly, I was feeling a little frustrated because, the constant veering off course from the main story was starting to feel a bit confusing.  It made me laugh when Betteredge’s daughter, Penelope, who is reading what he is writing, even tells her father to get to the point; to tell the story of the moonstone and not his own story.

 

After our class discussion, I thought to myself, why do my classmates see him as an endearing old man?  Weren’t they annoyed at how dry the first twenty pages were?  Luckily, being the diligent student that I am, I felt guilty for not seeing Betteredge as endearing and for being so annoyed with him.  I decided that I better read it again and that perhaps my modern expectation had tainted my first read.   After I reread the prologue and first chapters and found myself much less annoyed because I was able to pick up on the nuances and quirks in Betteredge’s personality and Wilkes actually uses documents (really creative, especially given the time and the lack of mystery novel prototype to follow) to feed us much of the exposition that as a reader, I will need to know if I am to follow the mystery of the moonstone.  However, the first go round when I had no idea what I was reading about, I felt mostly annoyed.  I wanted to tell Betteredge to stop beating around the bush and get to the point.  Rereading it made me appreciate it and enjoy it more.  It seems like “The Moonstone” will be one of those novels that gets better each time you read it because you pick up on something new each time that you hadn’t previously noticed or maybe even perhaps that on a second or third read, when the characters are concreted in your mind and the facts are easy to keep straight.  As the book continues, it gets considerably better to read by each turn of the page. I am not usually a mystery kind of girl, but despite my best efforts to dislike the novel, I am really enjoying it!