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Nada The Lily Q4 - Story
The story is a classic tragedy, with the inescapable nature of tragedy emphasized by it's being related after the fact by Mopo. You know it's a tragedy going in, as Mopo foreshadows everything. Is the story the better or the worse for this handling?
Comments
I felt there was a certain distance between the author and the audience, here, and this is in part because of the narrator and his framing device which added even another layer. The Orenda, which is a good comparison novel I think, felt much more immediate. We felt like we were part of the action. I found that much more effective, myself.
This book reminded me of many similar sort of cultural 'folktale' novels in it's telling - some of which we've read at the club. These would include the Arthurian Romances we just read, A Hero Born by Jin Yong, and Musashi by Eili Yoshikawa. There's a certain similar stiffness, or formality, of style to all of these. It's not my favourite style, but I get along with it fine.
I kept being reminded of Tolkien - we know that JRRT admired Haggard's writing and (so to speak) recycled elements of She into Galadriel. Here at the start of chapter 30 we have "All that is hidden is not lost" which it's surely impossible to read without being reminded of "not all those who wander are lost".
But on a bigger scale the Umslopogaas and Nada tragedy is borrowed and inverted in The Silmarillion in the Túrin and Nienor cycle. Here in Nada the two believe they are brother and sister, are constrained by that, and find out the truth too late to avoid tragedy. In The Silmarillion, the two are actually brother and sister but this fact is hidden from them, and the revelation destroys them. In both cases the tragedy is foreshadowed multiple times, and the reader is acutely aware of the dilemma, but their doom cannot be avoided.
It was a very simple plot, and there wasn't a lot of complication added to it. Yes, the ending was foreshadowed, but there weren't any surprises in how we got from start to end. I though it was quite dull.
I think that what was supposed to carry to story was the window onto the foreign (to Haggard's readers) world of the pre-colonial Zulus. But as I said elsewhere, the description of that was too extreme to convince me, so I treated the whole thing as a bit of badly-thought-through fiction.