It's taken me far longer to read “Camilla, A Picture Of Youth” than almost any other book of equivalent length. While I was slogging through it, I asked myself why it was such a hard go. Maybe we can figure that out as we examine it. I promise this review won't be anything like as tough.
Camilla is the daughter of a country parson and his wife, a very close couple. The parson also has three other children, two more daughters and a son. As with a lot of 18th Century novels, this one focuses on the children's search for suitable mates. Camilla is particularly drawn to a man named Edgar who's been close to her family since they were children. Needless to say, various circumstances conspire to keep them apart. Will they marry by the story's end? What do you think?
From the modern point of view, “Camilla” shares one particular frustrating detail with many of its contemporary novels – however much these characters care for each other, they simply will not tell each other how they're feeling. For that matter, they will only rarely say out loud why they do what they do, leaving lots and lots of room for misunderstanding. At one point, Camilla observes Edgar behaving in what seems to her a rather jealous manner when he sees her talking to some other man. This jealousy on his part delights her so much that she spends the next several hours smiling and laughing along with several other people in the party with them, including the various men around. Edgar, seeing this, assumes that Camilla is nothing more than a coquette (in today's words, a “flirt”), thrilled with any attention that might come her way and with no value for any more serious characteristics. By this time, the two of them have known each other for a lot of years – you'd think they'd know better, and five minutes of frank conversation would clear everything up. Then, of course, you wouldn't have a story. Still...grrr.
Of course, in the England of 1796, this novel's publication date, one did not simply go to the object of one's affection and say “I love you and I want to marry you,” particularly if one was a woman of the upper class approaching a man of the upper class. At least not in fiction. So it's comprehensible, but still annoying from the modern perspective. And that wasn't the only thing one didn't talk about. Later in the novel, for instance, Camilla finds herself in a financially difficult position, through little or no fault of her own, and can't bring herself to admit this to her parents. She's terrifically close to them both, and they are accustomed to speak to her as a friend, but she still can't bear to be honest with them. Let's face it, that kind of frankness between parents and adult children is difficult now, let alone in the late 18th century. No wonder things changed. Living like Camilla is enough to make you ill, as it does to Camilla herself.
As a matter of fact, once this financial embarrassment gets started roughly three quarters of the way through the story, the narrative takes a much gloomier aspect. It's pretty close to a gothic tale of all things, with illness and mysterious deaths all over the place. The only thing it doesn't have in common with other gothic tales is the presence of ghosts; there are none of those here.
Be that as it may, once these various horrors kicked in – financial difficulties, sickness, spousal abuse – I got a lot more interested in the story. If no other reason for this comes to mind, it's for sure that a lot more happens to these characters once the nasty stuff begins than happened to them before. So in truth, the first four hundred pages or so read like the gradual setup for the last two hundred. This setup is certainly necessary, so that the last quarter of the story makes sense, but it's less involving in and of itself.
Well, there you go. I took such a long time reading this thing because, although it wasn't entirely obvious to me, I was reading the preparation for the story more than the story itself. This was a bit of a surprise. Fanny Burney had been writing for about 35 years when “Camilla” came out, and she was usually better than this about getting a move on. Her narrative skills here are very much in evidence, and there's not too much of the overdramatic quality that you often find among her contemporaries. Still, I'm afraid you're going to have to judge for yourself how much of the enormous detail in this story you can take. For me, it was a bit more than was quite comfortable.
Benshlomo says, Some novels are shorter and some are longer, but that doesn't always depend on page count.
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