'Book clubs, put The Jane Austen Book Club on your reading list and meetings will never be quite the same again: Karen/Jane may be looking in!'
Click here to read The Heswall Originals Book Group's thoughts on The Jane Austen Book Club

'This is a book that invites introspection from established groups, possibly even navel gazing. So we spent quite a long time comparing and contrasting our group to the group in the book, and it has to be admitted quietly patting ourselves on the back...'
Click here to read The Belper Book Group onThe Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler

A review expressing the opinion of the majority of the members of the Heswall (Wirral) ‘Originals’ Book Group.

’Each of us has a private Austen,’ This opening sentence of Karen Joy Fowler’s novel is true for the six members (one for each of Jane Austen’s novels) of the Central Valley/River City all-Jane-Austen-all-the-time book club. Founder member, Jocelyn, unmarried dedicated match maker and control freak, starts the club as a diversion for her best friend Sylvia recently deserted by her husband Daniel. Theirs was Jocelyn’s first match.

A Prologue introduces the members, mostly aware of the others ‘private Austen’. Only Grigg, the sole male participant has not revealed his Austen (if he has one). Nor is it clear why Jocelyn has offered him membership. Is she matchmaking again? Certainly not for elderly, much married, garrulous and ostensibly dotty Bernadette; not for Allegra, Sylvia’s defiantly self-proclaimed lesbian daughter. Prudie, ‘true Janeite’ and a t28 the baby of the group is currently married. Of course, Grigg’s own marital status is unknown.

Having presented her cast of characters, Fowler has them host monthly meetings to discuss the Austen novels. They start chez Jocelyn with ‘Emma’, naturally! At each venue Fowler seizes the opportunity to ‘look around’ in their lives and report with all the cool yet affectionate irony of Austen herself. The choice of narrative voice, unconventional and initially puzzling, is refreshingly effective. The Jane Austen Book Club takes on a collective personal to tell its own story, yet allows each member an individual voice.

Literary discussion/criticism may be the purpose of the group, but little detail of theirs is relayed o the reader, except as a means of pointing u facets of the group’s personalities. Thus Allegra is suspected of not being quite a keen on Austen as other members. She accuses her of having written ‘dangerous’ books supporting ght emyth of happy endings. For her Mother, Sylvia, Austen offers comford in the often unremarkable security of those endings. Grigg’s big faux pas is to turn up with a brand-new complete works; hardly the hallmark of a real devotee. Yet he makes some startlingly astute observations during discussion despite his penchant for drawing comparisons with science fiction. Perhaps it’s all the ‘the formula’. Prudie’s reactions are coloured by her strange childhood with her outrageous mother; her Austen is darker and ever changing. No wonder sh uprefers, irritatingly, to express herself in French sometimes imperfectly understood by the group. Throughout her long life and many marriages Bernadette has appreciated the ‘plotlines’ of courtship and looks to Austen for the comic implications of romance.

Having let Austen/Fowler into their lives, the group are finally ‘all married or dating’. Jane would have been so pleased.

For the benefit of readers who have suffered the embarrassment of sometimes misremembering the plot or characters of a particular Austen novel, Fowler provides a welcome safety net in the form of a ‘Readers’ Guide.’ A brief synopsis of each novel and responses to it are appended. For book group members there is a list of humorous ‘Questions for discussion’ surely issued with no malicious intent.

This is a good read: unchallenging but funny, witty and satisfying since it underlines Austen’s enduring power to influence lives. Karen Joy Fowler is far too clever to fall into the trap of attempting a pastiche of Jane’s portrayal of 19th century English manners, class, love and romance, yet this novel treats modern American/Western preoccupations in similar ways. She is obviously Austen’s devoted but unblinkered admirer, and herein lies her success. Book clubs, put The Jane Austen Book Club on your reading list and meetings will never be quite the same again: Karen/Jane may be looking in!
 
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'This is a book that invites introspection from established groups, possibly even navel gazing. So we spent quite a long time comparing and contrasting our group to the group in the book, and it has to be admitted quietly patting ourselves on the back...'
The Belper Book Group onThe Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler

Our group was formed initially as a result of a Derbyshire County Council’s Millennium initiative and is now four years old. Rereading our original review (we read The Impressionist by Hari Kunzru) I find that although the group seems to have progressed and be very different a surprising amount remains unchanged. We are still members of Derbyshire’s Bookchat scheme, and most of our books are still provided by Belper library.

We meet at The Queens Head on Chesterfield Road, Belper, once a month. The pub let us use their facilities for absolutely nothing, continuing to support us so loyally. These two factors mean that membership of the group is totally free. Although any one who wants to buy me a half is welcome. It is a source of real pride that anyone can come along and that ability to afford to buy books does not need to be a factor. All that is required to join Belper Book Chat is an open mind and the willingness to read one book a month chosen by the group.

One of the bonuses of being a large group, with over twenty five members as I write, is that if any particular title is a book too far, then a member can opt out that month without too many qualms. Our meetings average 10 to 15 readers, which is comfortable. Enough voices to sound a wide variety of opinions but not so intimidating those quieter members find it hard to speak out.

Mostly we read books drawn from Derbyshire’s Bookchat scheme. Generally the county produces a book list once a year and we chose from it.  We publish our programme a year in advance. This year has been a little different. The BBC’s Big Read heavily influenced us. We wanted to read several of the titles from the Top 100 so we added those to our wish list. The library was willing to help us even though it meant a lot of extra work for them. These were:

Rebbecca – Daphne Du Maurier
The Gormanghast Trilogy – Mervyn Peake
Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
Northern Lights – Phillip Pullman
Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen

Our programme this year has also included D B Pierre’s Booker Prize winning novel Vernon God Little, Dinner for Two by Mike Gayle, Affinity by Sarah Waters and What’s Left by Tony Booth, as well as poetry by Simon Armitage. One of our aims remains to make our programme as broad as possible.

As we assembled this time, I wasn’t at all sure this was the great idea it had seemed at first. We have some real Jane Austen fans and experts in the group. As the day approached I had realised that if they didn’t how their idol had been used, they could be ruthless. So I was a little nervous as we gathered, wondering what everyone would make of it.

Our meetings have evolved. I still bring some prepared questions either from the Internet or those produced by the Book Chat Scheme, but these days we rarely need them. In this case as the book has been popular in the States I had found questions on an American Bookseller’s web-site, but had found them overly long and complicated. This is a book group not an A-Level exam.

Our meetings are very informal. I just asked, “What did you think of it?” and off everyone went. These days I only need prepared questions when the chatter dries up, to move discussion on to areas we may not have considered. Quite often, with a nice controversial book with plenty of content, I can just sit back and enjoy the meeting. 

This was one of those happy occasions. Two hours later we were still going strong. Priscilla Bailey, Derbyshire’s Reader Development Officer, who had originally set up the group and had come along to be Reader Development Person in charge of digital camera (see happy smiling photos of group) had to call a halt. We would quite happily have kept going.  In fact quite a lot of us did downstairs in the bar afterwards.

Thinking back with the help of the notes, Priscilla kindly provided, we covered a lot of ground.

This is a book that invites introspection from established groups, possibly even navel gazing. So we spent quite a long time comparing and contrasting our group to the group in the book, and it has to be admitted quietly patting ourselves on the back. We are bigger. We came together as a result of individual choice rather than pre-selection by an individual, who may have had little more than socialising and match making in mind. We noted the echoes of Emma here.

We read widely, they just read Jane Austen. Was this a strength or a weakness? This actually led to a nice digression. We had a lot of fun with suggestions for books that they could read next:

We thought they really ought to try some science fiction. The Robert Heinlein they’d turned their noses up at would be a start, or one of our first books The Sparrow, by Mary Doria Russell. We also thought they should read some fiction aimed at men, and were having a few goes at ‘What is male and female fiction’, when someone suggested Westerns. Although I think this was with their tongue firmly in their cheek.

We talk about the books, something we never seem to have to work at, it just happens that way. They talk about each other. In fact we though Jane Austen was just a convenient hanger to draw a plot around, and it was a moot point whether any other author would have performed the same function. As it happens we couldn’t think of any that would work as well, so I guess that speaks for itself.

We considered the episodic nature of the book. How each chapter relates to a particular book group member and did this member resemble a character from the book Jane Austen book they were reading. This brought to mind other books of similar structure: Maeve Binchy’s Evening Class and How to Make an American Quilt by Whitney Otto.

Some of us felt we had missed out quite a lot because we had not read enough Jane Austen, and we asked those who had to spot the connections between characters and plots for us. We wondered, in this case was it better to read the notes first? 

Then we moved on to the style of the writing – was it in any way comparable to Austen? Were her aims the same as Austen? Did she achieve what we felt she had set out to achieve? Was this anything more than making a lot of money?

Many of us felt this was a book with very commercial origins. It was conceived and written to appeal to a literate audience but written in a style that was almost a screen play and would convert easily to film. None the less we had to admit that it worked and worked well. Although some of us had felt uncomfortable, as if we had been exploited by the book on a level we never quite got to grips with, we had still enjoyed it.

We found that the booked lacked the subversive element that we had found whenever we discussed Austen. To many of her first readers she was profoundly shocking. There is nothing remotely shocking in this book. Its a nice safe read, with the exception that it plays with an icon.

Austen was a supreme exponent of irony and although we found very many funny one-liners, on balance this was lightweight funny, rather than ironically funny. Occasionally it did better, we especially liked the part where Allegra finds Corinne’s rejection letters, her anger is at least as much about the quality of Corinne’s writing as about the betrayal.

“How dare Corinne write up Allegra’s secret stories and send them off to magazines to be published?
How dare Corinne write them so poorly that no one wished to take them”

Then the sting in the tail of the theme when the July chapter ends with the publication notice for a new Terrance Hopkins mystery, where the plot has clearly been stolen from ‘tall’ tales told at the Group’s dinner table. 

Of course Austen also was rejected many times. Could this mean Corrine’s writing was actually of real literary worth? Just unrecognised as yet.  Another of those questions the book never answers but leaves the reader play with.

This led us on to Bernadette. In particular, her stories, which her group never quite seems to believe, yet events show could well be true. From there we went on to the nature of truth and story. In this novel in particular and in the novel form in general.

We had a sense, that out there somewhere, there might be yet another book group, reading a book, about us, reading about a book group reading Jane Austen, Like the infinite reflections in two parallel mirrors, receding further and further away. Our world wobbled, when we considered that the members of the Austen group never recognise the similarities of their situations to the novels in question. Is there someone out there writing about us. Was this the connection to Robert Heinlein that had several of us wondering?

We ended with lots more questions. Who is speaking – is it the voice of the group or does the voice change in each chapter? Did we like the ending – we were undecided, and saw comparisons with Anne Tyler’s, Ladder of Years. What about all those character related questions and the quotes? Were they boring, pretentious or insightful. Do we really all have our own Austen? What was our own particular personal Austen about? We still had lots left to go at –  (See the digression about after hours drinking.)  Particularly men in the book and men in book groups in general, do they really all carry big books? You tell us, looking round we don’t think so, although we eyeballed one particularly large notebook on the table. We liked Grigg and his sisters and particularly liked the fact that he had read The Mysteries of Udolpho, which had those of us who had read Stranger in a Strange Land preening.

We suggest you read the book and decide for yourself. In the meantime we are still deciding who we would cast in the film.  Have fun – we did.