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Book reviews: Vanity Fair and Pilgrim's Progress
Vanity Fair: A more or less fun regency era story with some clunky lessons bolted on to make it more acceptable. The good people don't exactly thrive and the bad(ish) people do pretty well for most of it, so I didn't find it a convincing morality play. But the story itself was fine, with some decent characters.
Having finished that, the obvious next step was to go to its namesake, Pilgrim's Progress. Which is... weird. Super allegorical, which I knew going in, but the allegories aren't very consistent? It starts by setting up the journey the main character is on as the process of becoming Christian and finding salvation, but then later the characters are openly talking about being Christian as a thing external to the journey. And along the way, someone dies a martyr's death, but angels come and take them straight to heaven, even though they were only halfway to heaven in terms of the journey? Eventually it is revealed that the main character's name is Christian, and later we find out that his wife's name is Chritiana, yet in the first book she is against his pilgrimage and stays at home with the kids. So was her name something else during that period, and only got changed for Pilgrim's Progress 2: The Next Generation? I'm not the target audience for this kind of literature, I realize, but it still doesn't seem to much to ask Bunyan to think through the meta-narrative.
So, eh. I wouldn't recommend either of them very strongly, but I wouldn't say stay away either.
Having finished that, the obvious next step was to go to its namesake, Pilgrim's Progress. Which is... weird. Super allegorical, which I knew going in, but the allegories aren't very consistent? It starts by setting up the journey the main character is on as the process of becoming Christian and finding salvation, but then later the characters are openly talking about being Christian as a thing external to the journey. And along the way, someone dies a martyr's death, but angels come and take them straight to heaven, even though they were only halfway to heaven in terms of the journey? Eventually it is revealed that the main character's name is Christian, and later we find out that his wife's name is Chritiana, yet in the first book she is against his pilgrimage and stays at home with the kids. So was her name something else during that period, and only got changed for Pilgrim's Progress 2: The Next Generation? I'm not the target audience for this kind of literature, I realize, but it still doesn't seem to much to ask Bunyan to think through the meta-narrative.
So, eh. I wouldn't recommend either of them very strongly, but I wouldn't say stay away either.
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https://www.chairish.com/product/694546/pilgrims-progress
http://kinderbooks.net/shop/independent-book-publishers/eerdmans-books-for-young-readers/dangerous-journey/
https://www.flickr.com/photos/mutantskeleton/8261099300
http://www.anesi.com/pilgrim.htm
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