Tuesday, December 11, 2007
Rhett Butler's People
As a huge fan of Gone With the Wind, I ate up the sequel Scarlett by Alexandra Ripley, which came out in 1992. When I heard about Donald McCaig's Rhett Butler's People, I was the first one on the hold list at my library. It was....OK. I will admit now that I didn't finish it. I read about half and it just didn't hold my attention. The story wasn't bad, it just wasn't what I expected or wanted. I thought it would be GWTW told from Rhett's point of view, with more insight into Rhett's background. It is, for the most part. But chapters jump around to different characters, such as Belle Watling, Melanie Wilkes, Rhett's sister and friends. And there are parts of the story where Rhett is completely absent. I guess that's why it's Rhett Bulter's People. Maybe I wanted more Rhett and less People. We do get some insight into Rhett's upbringing and how he got the reputation of a scoundrel. Of course, Rhett really is a good man, just misunderstood and misjudged (but we all knew that). But maybe what is so attractive about Rhett in GWTW is that we don't know much about him, and that makes him mysterious. Maybe it's the idea that he is a bit of a scoundrel. Take that away and what do you have? A really long novel that can't keep my attention.
1 comment:
Just read RHETT BUTLER'S PEOPLE and much enjoyed it - wallowed in it, really, as I occasionally go on a GWTW kick. Loved GWTW the movie (how can you not? The Max Steiner score and the every-cell-of-film-worth-framing-&-hanging-on-the-wall LOOK of it is enough to "send" ya right there; you can practically smell and taste and feel it!), was hooked by SCARLETT the novel & much more by the miniseries (which didn't make the fates of "supporting" GWTW players as dreary nor the Irish go WICKER MAN-ite at the end, as the novel did). Read GWTW twice; first found it a migrainish account of an obnoxious twit who never so much as got out of a green dress (except for the funerals she helped occur)in a quarter-zillion pages...Second time found its many virtues.
(Gonna try to find THE WINDS OF TARA in the library system. Thought THE WIND DONE GONE, which had such huge potential -& I love GOOD, hilarious parody a la Mel Brooks & Carl Reiner - was unreadable garbage from a foreigner to humor).
I'm neither a Civil War buff nor a fan of much science fiction, but I find myself fantasizing alternate-world stories of the war, usually of a somewhat super-powered Southern planter secretly educating and freeing slaves...which sometime changes to a WASP lord doing good for his Irish tenants. I think there are lots of folks out there with similar fantasies (maybe rooted in a simple wish to be that unlikely thing, rich and powerful but GOOD), and love of penitent / redemption fiction, so of course we'd eat up SCARLETT and RHETT BUTLER'S PEOPLE with little bother about discrepancies.
The discrepancies can even be fun, whether amongst-the-novels-&-films or their individual goofs and gaffes; anachronisms and Briticisms. My latest favorite, in RBP, is Rhett's supposedly ideal horse, all of 11 hands (44 inches at withers; a guy my size could practically walk over it!) high!
I like to imagine a film of RBP, then some genius getting rights to them all and editing them together, obviously leaving some redundant things out, and adding new material to make sense of it all (like fixing the Mammy deathbed scene for waaaay later...And adding Wade Hampton Hamilton and Ella Kennedy), while using the magic of "morphing" and other CGI tricks to reconcile the look and voices of different actors playing the same roles...As well as stuff like making Ashley look younger to start with and really wrecked after battle, prison camp and the starved tramp home.
However, I think the most essential thing is that Margaret Mitchell, and the other OFFICIAL GWTW permutations, had characters that grabbed you so much you never wanted to be finished with them. I hope more will come; I s'pose I hope a very high-quality on & on & on soap opera of it would happen.
Hope this wasn't too WINDY!
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