justice_turtle (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
justice_turtle) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
readallthenewberys2013-03-11 07:41 am
justice_turtle) wrote in readallthenewberys2013-03-11 07:41 am
Newbery Medal: The Trumpeter of Krakow (Eric P. Kelly), Part 2
We return to The Trumpeter of Krakow with chapter four, "The Good Jan Kanty".
* True to the title, the first page and a half of the chapter is a brief overview of Father Jan Kanty's awesomeness, told us by the narrator.
* After that, Kanty disavows the title "Father" a couple times while the Charnetskis thank him; this makes me eyeroll a bit, as this antipathy to the title "Father" for Catholic priests is mostly a nineteenth-century-America thing afaik, and pretty certainly not a pre-Reformation thing. I'm assuming Mr Kelly threw that in to make sure Jan Kanty stayed sympathetic to the early-twentieth-century-American audience he was writing for, which - y'know, part of writing historical fiction is knowing when to tweak historical facts to make your sympathetic characters seem more modern (in a subtle way, hopefully), but that grates on my ear just a bit.
* Jan Kanty offers to let the Charnetskis stay the night at his place while he tries to figure out how to help them. At this point Joseph mentions that he found a place they can rent; Kanty suggests the family come with him anyway till they decide whether to take the apartment, as it's going to be awkward to have a long discussion in the public square.
* So they do that. Joseph notices on the way that people in the street nod or doff their hats to Kanty, and a company of knights even salutes him with drawn swords, but he doesn't seem to care much about how awesome they all think him. It's a sliiiightly ham-handed way to make sure we realize he's To Be Trusted; I'm not sure what level of fairy-taleishness Mr Kelly is going for here, given the pages upon pages of Researched Historical Atmosphere, but the subtlety here is about on a par with...
...I know! It's like a medieval woodcut. He's writing a story told in medieval woodcuts: exaggerated characters in black-and-white detail act out a fairly simple morality-tale plot - with some twentieth-century twists. We've met The Holy Priest, The Angelic Girl, The Villain (marked by a physical disfigurement so we can tell who he is every time he appears); we'll encounter more characters, and some of them with more subtlety, as the story develops, but there's not nearly as much character development or as much plot in the next 150-odd pages as a post-Shakespeare generation tends to expect. ;-)
* Anyway, Jan Kanty and Pan Andrew then withdraw and talk about the mysterious pumpkin - excuse me, the Mysterious Pumpkin *grin* - while Joseph and Mrs Charnetski (who I'm pretty sure is going to lack a first name throughout) eat some food and discuss the new apartment. Mrs Charnetski is immediately taken with Joseph's description of Elzbietka, and fully agrees they should take the apartment and help look after her.
* On Jan Kanty's advice, the Charnetskis decide to be called by the surname Kowalski (Smith, less suspicious in these days when nobody is genre-savvy and everyone needs horseshoes) while they wait for the king to return, and to sell their cart and horses for some money to live on. In addition, Kanty says he can get Pan Andrew a job that should keep him out of harm's way, but more about that later. ;-) He also confirms that the apartment below Kreutz's should be a good place for the family to live without being bothered, as Kreutz is feared by the common folk who think him a sorceror and avoid his house, though Kanty knows him for a Godfearing man.
* While the Charnetskis wait on Jan Kanty's manservant to sell their horses and come back with the money, we hear of peasants visiting Kanty to ask for his prayers about things like cutworms and aching joints, and of him solving their problems WITH SKIENCE!, thus cementing his status in the eyes of the intended audience as a Sympathetic Character who has No Mumbo-Jumbo about him. *dry grin* (Also incidentally reinforcing the whole "superstitious peasants!!!1!!eleventy!!!" thing that you get from practically everybody writing Middle Ages for kidlets in this era... ;P I think we've already established, this book isn't going to question any tropes.)
* Joseph goes to sleep. When he wakes up, it's night, and by lantern-light he sees his dad cutting apart the pumpkin, which turns out to have an unidentified Bright Shiny Thing hidden in it. Pan Andrew puts the Shiny Thing in a bag provided by Jan Kanty, so it stops shining. Joseph asks "what was that?", and Pan Andrew tells him that it's a matter for great worry, that he doesn't want to burden Joseph with it, but if Joseph has "real interest" and not "mere curiosity" about it (what? I do not follow this distinction), he will eventually be told all. Just not right now, because Pan Andrew has lost a lot in taking care of it, and has "not the heart to burden your young life with its secrets".
* In Chapter 5, the little group heads toward Pan Kreutz's house; on the way, they are joined by the dog which Joseph wrestled away from Elzbietka and Kreutz earlier today. This dog apparently knows by instinct that Joseph loves dogs and will treat it well! Oookay. Anyway, Pan Andrew says "bring him along" because they can use all the friends they can get right now, even canine ones.
* They also run across a duel, where two young men are fighting with uncapped swords, so that one or both would have been seriously injured if Jan Kanty hadn't broken up the fight. Father Kanty seems to know one of the young men, Johann Tring; he tells the other duelist he will hear his story tomorrow, sends the spectators off to their dorms (called "bursars", apparently), and starts scolding Tring. I'll mention here that Tring is Kreutz's assistant and will be accompanying the group home, even though that doesn't come up till later in the scene as written.
* Aaaand yeah, we run up against yet another round of Ugly Stranger. Shame, because Tring is the most shades-of-grey character in the entire book, and a lot could have been done with ambiguity if he wasn't played from the beginning as -- well, let's quote his description. :P
"In the light of the lantern Joseph glanced at the face of the student, Johann Tring, and received almost a shock - a feeling at least of violent repulsion. It was not that the face was distorted, indeed it was not, the eyes were bright and piercing, and the hair was black - the carriage of the body was erect, and the whiteness of the skin where the collar was rolled back stood in remarkable contrast to the hair and the blackness that lay about him." (I'll... just leave the part where non-white skin would be a cause for "violent repulsion" right here, yeah? o_O) "But the nose was thin and mean, the mouth was small and smug, and out of the eyes came a look that signified an utterly selfish spirit behind them." The author continues that Tring is so young this selfish expression is TOTALLY UNNATURAL, and Joseph is so non-cynical that he notices the unnaturalness where an older and more cynical man might ignore it.
Anyway, yeah, informed characteristics. At least this one character isn't actually deformed or Doomed To Villainy by genetics - his "thin nose" and "small mouth" might be caused, and I think Mr Kelly's trying to imply they are caused, by how Tring holds his face rather than how it naturally is. (He isn't succeeding in implying that, but it's not his fault; the "thin nose, small mouth, OMG EVIL" trope has been used too much by determinist authors to be reclaimed at one try.)
* A-ny-way. Tring eventually admits that he insulted the other guy first, and Kanty convinces him to go ask pardon tomorrow at dawn. Kanty then scolds him a bit further, and they all head to the house, where Tring's departure from the group to head to his own room is followed up by a repetition of Joseph's dislike for the man and the "indefinable threat of malignity" in his face. Yadda yadda yadda. o_O
* The Kovalskis-formerly-Charnetskis spend the rest of the chapter settling into their new home, with the detailed descriptions of everything which I've come to expect from this book. Pan Andrew becomes night trumpeter in the church tower - we all saw that coming, right? Or did I leave out too much of the repeated foreshadowing that makes it so very, very obvious? - and Joseph will soon begin to attend the Collegium Minus (high-school equivalent) with the other boys of his age and social class. Elzbietka also begins to settle in as a surrogate daughter to the family.
* Chapter 6 tells us in great and well-researched detail of Pan Andrew's new duties as trumpeter; of the church tower's layout with its big alarm bell, its eight windows, its red lantern to point out the direction of a fire (the trumpeter watches for fires and invasions, as well as keeping the time); and of how Pan Andrew plans to have Joseph as backup trumpeter in case he falls ill or is harmed by any of the people who want to kill him. For this purpose, Pan Andrew sends Joseph home with the tune of the Heynal written down on a bit of parchment, so he can learn the melody first and then begin learning to play it on the trumpet.
* Near the end of the chapter, when Joseph returns home, the elderly landlady doesn't answer the door; instead, her middle-aged son Stas does so.
Oh Stas, Stas, Stas. :PPPP Oh Eric P. Kelly, you are so reliably failtastic about character descriptions. Oh sir. :P
Stas is both physically and mentally less-abled, as far as I can tell. But Joseph, our POV character, is "alarmed" by meeting him - first because he's startled that a middle-aged man is still living with his mother; second because, here we go again quoting the descriptions at length:
"[H]e did not expect to see a man who had the face of one of middle age. Yet the term 'man' was less applicable to the son than was the word 'creature', for he was lank and thin and bowed over uncannily; long wisps of hair fell about his eyes; his fingers were bony and clawlike; his cheeks were sunken, and his eyes peered out of hollow caverns as if they feared the light." So we gather that Stas is hunchbacked - a major disability for a king in medieval times, let alone a low-class man for whom the available jobs are going to be manual-labor-based - and probably undernourished, yeah?
But that's not what we're supposed to notice here. o_O I continue: "As he moved ahead of Joseph, with the lantern in his hand, he clung to the wall as does a cat, shunning open spaces and skulking as if always needing a rear defense. [snip] [T]he creature raised one of his hands and passed it over the boy's shoulder. Joseph heard the long nails scraping on his coat - in a horrible second it seemed as if he could feel them on his skin."
It's a really well-done horror passage, honestly. I'm breaking it up to snark at it because the whole two pages are so creepy. But they're creepy at the expense of this poor guy who never (I'm speaking from my memories of the book) receives any character motivation beyond wanting money, who is badly treated and maligned by everybody, who exists only to further the plot.
And now that we have our full cast introduced, I'm going to call out that Stas is ALSO the only one of the baddies who is Polish-born. Tring is German, Scarred Evil Dude is a Tartar; Elzbietka and the Charnetskis and Jan Kanty are of Polish blood, as is the King. And Stas is distinguished from these "good" Poles by being PHYSICALLY AND MENTALLY DISABLED and therefore creeptastic. Blargh. :P
* Anyway, Stas grabbed Joseph's shoulder in order to ask him for "a little - little coin", which Joseph gives him "gladly"; Stas thanks him with a "bless thee" and asks (in a sort of euphemistic roundabout way) for more money later. I'm going to stop again and point out that tipping the disabled doorman is the kind of thing a really accurately medieval boy of good upbringing and landowner class should do without a second thought, but it's being played here to set Stas up as a grasping greedy dislikable person who can be bribed later. *major eyerolling* This book has really gone downhill since I read it last. ;P
* Pan Kreutz and young Tring are experimenting in the loft, with intermittent flashes of flame visible through the window. Stas mutters that Kreutz serves the devil and Tring practically is a devil; then he leaves Joseph alone.
* A week later, though, when all is much the same, Elzbietka runs down the stairs frightened by a cry of pain and some voices she has heard in her uncle's loft. She asks Joseph to go and spy on Pan Kreutz (not in those words) to see that all is well. Joseph promptly runs to do so.
* The rest of the chapter consists in Joseph spying on Kreutz and Tring - with no uneasiness about the morality of his actions, of course. I hadn't realized how very "modern" or un-medieval some of these characters' attitudes were until I started this re-read.
* Tring and Kreutz have a long conversation in which we learn that Tring, not a very good alchemist himself, has been hypnotizing Kreutz, and wishes to use his knowledge to create the Philosopher's Stone and make LOTS OF GOLD. Kreutz, being coded as a "good guy" in this story, wishes to find neither the secret of eternal youth nor that of creating gold; instead, he's what the people of the day would have called a "natural philosopher", studying How Things Work as a road to wisdom about "the spirit which is behind material things".
* A quick digression: Kreutz remarks, and I'm not sure how to feel about it, that one of the things he wants to know is "how one might seek to help and save the souls of men whose bodies are from birth misshapen". I'm sure this is being coded as a Good Thing about Kreutz - he's a nice man, he wants to help the handicapped! - but the exact phrasing makes me facepalm mightily, since it kiiiind of implies that the souls of disabled people are in more danger of damnation than those of the able-bodied, and also that he's not so much interested in helping them on this earth. (I may be reading into this. Like I say, I'm not sure! I'm just really inclined to judge everything about disabled people in this book, now we've met Stas.)
* Anyway. Hypnotism, gold; where are we? Right. In the trance from which he awoke when he yelled out and scared Elzbietka, Kreutz stated that "that which every astrologer, alchemist, and magician has sought for centuries was within a few yards of the place where [he] sat." Tring and Kreutz discuss this for a minute, decide that Kreutz must have been wrong because CLEARLY neither the refugees, nor Stas or his mom, nor the students whose quarters Tring shares, could possibly have anything of such value in their possession... ^_^ This ends the chapter.
(Except for a quick note that Stas is definitely mentally disabled as well as physically so; Kreutz refers to him as a "half-wit". I wasn't completely sure, as everybody in this book has a kind of formalized speaking style...)
* ...You know what? As of page 94 right here, I give up on this book. It's better than most of the Newberys yet, but not good enough to spend my time on. I'll just do a quick summary of the rest:
* Joseph starts taking some of his father's hours as trumpeter, for practice. He and Elzbietka have a conversation where Joseph says - as a joke, but Elzbietka takes him seriously - that if he ever plays the Heynal straight through without stopping at the broken note, it will be a signal to her that something is wrong and she must run straight to Jan Kanty.
* Evil Scarred Tartar Dude, whose name is Bogdan Grozny ("The Terrible") but most people in this area call him Button-Face Peter, runs a raid on the Charnetskis' apartment - getting in by bribing Stas and then refusing to pay up, because NOBODY is nice to Stas in this book - and tries to steal the Shiny Thing, which we will learn later is called the Great Tarnov Crystal, and is a gazing-ball the size of a man's head.
* Kreutz the alchemist overhears Bogdan plotting with Stas and cooks up a scheme to use AWESOME FIREWORKS to foil the Plot. This works. However, once Kreutz sees the Great Tarnov Macguffin being shiny when Bogdan drops it, he steals it for himself! Pan Andrew assumes Bogdan has it; he is depressed to have failed in his Sacred Trust to keep the crystal safe, but figures at least his family won't be attacked anymore, and is not quite as careful.
* Bogdan later traps both Pan Andrew and Joseph in the church tower when they are there together to play the trumpet. Bogdan's hired thugs tie Pan Andrew up, but he forces Joseph to play the Heynal so nobody will know there's a problem. Elzbietka, of course, has been sleepless from worry about her uncle (who is acting weirder and weirder under Tring's repeated hypnosis sessions), and hears when Joseph adds a couple of notes to the Heynal to finish out the tune. It's played four times - north, south, east, west - so she knows he must have done it on purpose, and does indeed run to Jan Kanty through the dark 2am streets. Luckily, Kanty is up, and calls the watch, who rescue Joseph and his father unharmed. Bogdan escapes, but he'll be captured again Because Of Reasons at the proper plotty moment. ;-)
* That's pretty much the climax of the story. Pan Andrew figures out that Bogdan doesn't have the Crystal, because he was demanding it in the church tower; but he doesn't know where it is until, a few weeks later, Kreutz shows it to Tring, who makes him go into a trance gazing at it and demands he find the recipe for the Philosopher's Stone, and Kreutz's overtired brain cooks up a process that ends with GIANT EXPLOSIONS and because Tring is major fail as an alchemist and doesn't realize that will happen, they set like half of Krakow on fire. :P Somehow Tring and Kreutz both escape, though many other people die, and Kreutz has a mental breakdown and wanders the streets holding the Great Tarnov Crystal until Jan Kanty finds him and takes him home for safety's sake.
* And now the king has returned home at this most opportune moment! And Jan Kanty procures an audience with him, and everybody goes before the King - Kanty, Bogdan, Pan Andrew, and Kreutz. The ladies and the dog stay home, with a man from the watch to look after them.
(I would be judgier about this if Elzbietka hadn't gotten to save the day earlier, and if some of the conversations I skipped over hadn't been, for instance, a rather pointed conversation between Joseph and Elzbietka about why can't SHE go to the college too, huh, he doesn't know, she's certainly as smart as any of the boys there. *grin* A whole lot of this book is kind of Telling The Middle Ages How They Should Have Been, though not actually shaking anything up societally.)
* Anyway, so everybody recaps stuff, Bogdan confesses to being an agent of Ivan the Terrible - who's trying to start a war on the eastern front and needs the Tarnov Crystal to pay off the Tartars - and Pan Andrew asks the King to take charge of the crystal, that being part of his oath (to give it to the king if his family could no longer protect it)...
...but Kreutz, cackling maniacally, snatches the crystal from the King's own hands and runs to the brink of the river that curves right around the base of the Wawel castle, where he FLINGS IT IN!!! and yells that now it can't do any more damage. The king agrees, the crystal stays there, Bogdan is banished from Poland and sent to tell Ivan that he really doesn't want to try to steal the crystal from the bottom of the river, and everybody is happy.
* Epilogue: The adult Charnetskis and the Kreutzes moved back to the Ukraine together, while Joseph stayed in Krakow to study. Tring went home to Germany and became known for black magic. Kreutz eventually recovered from his breakdown, with no memory of what he had done, ta-da! Joseph married Elzbietka when they grew up, because of course he did, this is a Standard YA Adventure Novel and you can only have a girl in one of those if she's the love interest. ;P Krakow still exists and so does the church of Our Lady and they still play the Heynal there. "Hark, it is sounding now." The end.
* True to the title, the first page and a half of the chapter is a brief overview of Father Jan Kanty's awesomeness, told us by the narrator.
* After that, Kanty disavows the title "Father" a couple times while the Charnetskis thank him; this makes me eyeroll a bit, as this antipathy to the title "Father" for Catholic priests is mostly a nineteenth-century-America thing afaik, and pretty certainly not a pre-Reformation thing. I'm assuming Mr Kelly threw that in to make sure Jan Kanty stayed sympathetic to the early-twentieth-century-American audience he was writing for, which - y'know, part of writing historical fiction is knowing when to tweak historical facts to make your sympathetic characters seem more modern (in a subtle way, hopefully), but that grates on my ear just a bit.
* Jan Kanty offers to let the Charnetskis stay the night at his place while he tries to figure out how to help them. At this point Joseph mentions that he found a place they can rent; Kanty suggests the family come with him anyway till they decide whether to take the apartment, as it's going to be awkward to have a long discussion in the public square.
* So they do that. Joseph notices on the way that people in the street nod or doff their hats to Kanty, and a company of knights even salutes him with drawn swords, but he doesn't seem to care much about how awesome they all think him. It's a sliiiightly ham-handed way to make sure we realize he's To Be Trusted; I'm not sure what level of fairy-taleishness Mr Kelly is going for here, given the pages upon pages of Researched Historical Atmosphere, but the subtlety here is about on a par with...
...I know! It's like a medieval woodcut. He's writing a story told in medieval woodcuts: exaggerated characters in black-and-white detail act out a fairly simple morality-tale plot - with some twentieth-century twists. We've met The Holy Priest, The Angelic Girl, The Villain (marked by a physical disfigurement so we can tell who he is every time he appears); we'll encounter more characters, and some of them with more subtlety, as the story develops, but there's not nearly as much character development or as much plot in the next 150-odd pages as a post-Shakespeare generation tends to expect. ;-)
* Anyway, Jan Kanty and Pan Andrew then withdraw and talk about the mysterious pumpkin - excuse me, the Mysterious Pumpkin *grin* - while Joseph and Mrs Charnetski (who I'm pretty sure is going to lack a first name throughout) eat some food and discuss the new apartment. Mrs Charnetski is immediately taken with Joseph's description of Elzbietka, and fully agrees they should take the apartment and help look after her.
* On Jan Kanty's advice, the Charnetskis decide to be called by the surname Kowalski (Smith, less suspicious in these days when nobody is genre-savvy and everyone needs horseshoes) while they wait for the king to return, and to sell their cart and horses for some money to live on. In addition, Kanty says he can get Pan Andrew a job that should keep him out of harm's way, but more about that later. ;-) He also confirms that the apartment below Kreutz's should be a good place for the family to live without being bothered, as Kreutz is feared by the common folk who think him a sorceror and avoid his house, though Kanty knows him for a Godfearing man.
* While the Charnetskis wait on Jan Kanty's manservant to sell their horses and come back with the money, we hear of peasants visiting Kanty to ask for his prayers about things like cutworms and aching joints, and of him solving their problems WITH SKIENCE!, thus cementing his status in the eyes of the intended audience as a Sympathetic Character who has No Mumbo-Jumbo about him. *dry grin* (Also incidentally reinforcing the whole "superstitious peasants!!!1!!eleventy!!!" thing that you get from practically everybody writing Middle Ages for kidlets in this era... ;P I think we've already established, this book isn't going to question any tropes.)
* Joseph goes to sleep. When he wakes up, it's night, and by lantern-light he sees his dad cutting apart the pumpkin, which turns out to have an unidentified Bright Shiny Thing hidden in it. Pan Andrew puts the Shiny Thing in a bag provided by Jan Kanty, so it stops shining. Joseph asks "what was that?", and Pan Andrew tells him that it's a matter for great worry, that he doesn't want to burden Joseph with it, but if Joseph has "real interest" and not "mere curiosity" about it (what? I do not follow this distinction), he will eventually be told all. Just not right now, because Pan Andrew has lost a lot in taking care of it, and has "not the heart to burden your young life with its secrets".
* In Chapter 5, the little group heads toward Pan Kreutz's house; on the way, they are joined by the dog which Joseph wrestled away from Elzbietka and Kreutz earlier today. This dog apparently knows by instinct that Joseph loves dogs and will treat it well! Oookay. Anyway, Pan Andrew says "bring him along" because they can use all the friends they can get right now, even canine ones.
* They also run across a duel, where two young men are fighting with uncapped swords, so that one or both would have been seriously injured if Jan Kanty hadn't broken up the fight. Father Kanty seems to know one of the young men, Johann Tring; he tells the other duelist he will hear his story tomorrow, sends the spectators off to their dorms (called "bursars", apparently), and starts scolding Tring. I'll mention here that Tring is Kreutz's assistant and will be accompanying the group home, even though that doesn't come up till later in the scene as written.
* Aaaand yeah, we run up against yet another round of Ugly Stranger. Shame, because Tring is the most shades-of-grey character in the entire book, and a lot could have been done with ambiguity if he wasn't played from the beginning as -- well, let's quote his description. :P
"In the light of the lantern Joseph glanced at the face of the student, Johann Tring, and received almost a shock - a feeling at least of violent repulsion. It was not that the face was distorted, indeed it was not, the eyes were bright and piercing, and the hair was black - the carriage of the body was erect, and the whiteness of the skin where the collar was rolled back stood in remarkable contrast to the hair and the blackness that lay about him." (I'll... just leave the part where non-white skin would be a cause for "violent repulsion" right here, yeah? o_O) "But the nose was thin and mean, the mouth was small and smug, and out of the eyes came a look that signified an utterly selfish spirit behind them." The author continues that Tring is so young this selfish expression is TOTALLY UNNATURAL, and Joseph is so non-cynical that he notices the unnaturalness where an older and more cynical man might ignore it.
Anyway, yeah, informed characteristics. At least this one character isn't actually deformed or Doomed To Villainy by genetics - his "thin nose" and "small mouth" might be caused, and I think Mr Kelly's trying to imply they are caused, by how Tring holds his face rather than how it naturally is. (He isn't succeeding in implying that, but it's not his fault; the "thin nose, small mouth, OMG EVIL" trope has been used too much by determinist authors to be reclaimed at one try.)
* A-ny-way. Tring eventually admits that he insulted the other guy first, and Kanty convinces him to go ask pardon tomorrow at dawn. Kanty then scolds him a bit further, and they all head to the house, where Tring's departure from the group to head to his own room is followed up by a repetition of Joseph's dislike for the man and the "indefinable threat of malignity" in his face. Yadda yadda yadda. o_O
* The Kovalskis-formerly-Charnetskis spend the rest of the chapter settling into their new home, with the detailed descriptions of everything which I've come to expect from this book. Pan Andrew becomes night trumpeter in the church tower - we all saw that coming, right? Or did I leave out too much of the repeated foreshadowing that makes it so very, very obvious? - and Joseph will soon begin to attend the Collegium Minus (high-school equivalent) with the other boys of his age and social class. Elzbietka also begins to settle in as a surrogate daughter to the family.
* Chapter 6 tells us in great and well-researched detail of Pan Andrew's new duties as trumpeter; of the church tower's layout with its big alarm bell, its eight windows, its red lantern to point out the direction of a fire (the trumpeter watches for fires and invasions, as well as keeping the time); and of how Pan Andrew plans to have Joseph as backup trumpeter in case he falls ill or is harmed by any of the people who want to kill him. For this purpose, Pan Andrew sends Joseph home with the tune of the Heynal written down on a bit of parchment, so he can learn the melody first and then begin learning to play it on the trumpet.
* Near the end of the chapter, when Joseph returns home, the elderly landlady doesn't answer the door; instead, her middle-aged son Stas does so.
Oh Stas, Stas, Stas. :PPPP Oh Eric P. Kelly, you are so reliably failtastic about character descriptions. Oh sir. :P
Stas is both physically and mentally less-abled, as far as I can tell. But Joseph, our POV character, is "alarmed" by meeting him - first because he's startled that a middle-aged man is still living with his mother; second because, here we go again quoting the descriptions at length:
"[H]e did not expect to see a man who had the face of one of middle age. Yet the term 'man' was less applicable to the son than was the word 'creature', for he was lank and thin and bowed over uncannily; long wisps of hair fell about his eyes; his fingers were bony and clawlike; his cheeks were sunken, and his eyes peered out of hollow caverns as if they feared the light." So we gather that Stas is hunchbacked - a major disability for a king in medieval times, let alone a low-class man for whom the available jobs are going to be manual-labor-based - and probably undernourished, yeah?
But that's not what we're supposed to notice here. o_O I continue: "As he moved ahead of Joseph, with the lantern in his hand, he clung to the wall as does a cat, shunning open spaces and skulking as if always needing a rear defense. [snip] [T]he creature raised one of his hands and passed it over the boy's shoulder. Joseph heard the long nails scraping on his coat - in a horrible second it seemed as if he could feel them on his skin."
It's a really well-done horror passage, honestly. I'm breaking it up to snark at it because the whole two pages are so creepy. But they're creepy at the expense of this poor guy who never (I'm speaking from my memories of the book) receives any character motivation beyond wanting money, who is badly treated and maligned by everybody, who exists only to further the plot.
And now that we have our full cast introduced, I'm going to call out that Stas is ALSO the only one of the baddies who is Polish-born. Tring is German, Scarred Evil Dude is a Tartar; Elzbietka and the Charnetskis and Jan Kanty are of Polish blood, as is the King. And Stas is distinguished from these "good" Poles by being PHYSICALLY AND MENTALLY DISABLED and therefore creeptastic. Blargh. :P
* Anyway, Stas grabbed Joseph's shoulder in order to ask him for "a little - little coin", which Joseph gives him "gladly"; Stas thanks him with a "bless thee" and asks (in a sort of euphemistic roundabout way) for more money later. I'm going to stop again and point out that tipping the disabled doorman is the kind of thing a really accurately medieval boy of good upbringing and landowner class should do without a second thought, but it's being played here to set Stas up as a grasping greedy dislikable person who can be bribed later. *major eyerolling* This book has really gone downhill since I read it last. ;P
* Pan Kreutz and young Tring are experimenting in the loft, with intermittent flashes of flame visible through the window. Stas mutters that Kreutz serves the devil and Tring practically is a devil; then he leaves Joseph alone.
* A week later, though, when all is much the same, Elzbietka runs down the stairs frightened by a cry of pain and some voices she has heard in her uncle's loft. She asks Joseph to go and spy on Pan Kreutz (not in those words) to see that all is well. Joseph promptly runs to do so.
* The rest of the chapter consists in Joseph spying on Kreutz and Tring - with no uneasiness about the morality of his actions, of course. I hadn't realized how very "modern" or un-medieval some of these characters' attitudes were until I started this re-read.
* Tring and Kreutz have a long conversation in which we learn that Tring, not a very good alchemist himself, has been hypnotizing Kreutz, and wishes to use his knowledge to create the Philosopher's Stone and make LOTS OF GOLD. Kreutz, being coded as a "good guy" in this story, wishes to find neither the secret of eternal youth nor that of creating gold; instead, he's what the people of the day would have called a "natural philosopher", studying How Things Work as a road to wisdom about "the spirit which is behind material things".
* A quick digression: Kreutz remarks, and I'm not sure how to feel about it, that one of the things he wants to know is "how one might seek to help and save the souls of men whose bodies are from birth misshapen". I'm sure this is being coded as a Good Thing about Kreutz - he's a nice man, he wants to help the handicapped! - but the exact phrasing makes me facepalm mightily, since it kiiiind of implies that the souls of disabled people are in more danger of damnation than those of the able-bodied, and also that he's not so much interested in helping them on this earth. (I may be reading into this. Like I say, I'm not sure! I'm just really inclined to judge everything about disabled people in this book, now we've met Stas.)
* Anyway. Hypnotism, gold; where are we? Right. In the trance from which he awoke when he yelled out and scared Elzbietka, Kreutz stated that "that which every astrologer, alchemist, and magician has sought for centuries was within a few yards of the place where [he] sat." Tring and Kreutz discuss this for a minute, decide that Kreutz must have been wrong because CLEARLY neither the refugees, nor Stas or his mom, nor the students whose quarters Tring shares, could possibly have anything of such value in their possession... ^_^ This ends the chapter.
(Except for a quick note that Stas is definitely mentally disabled as well as physically so; Kreutz refers to him as a "half-wit". I wasn't completely sure, as everybody in this book has a kind of formalized speaking style...)
* ...You know what? As of page 94 right here, I give up on this book. It's better than most of the Newberys yet, but not good enough to spend my time on. I'll just do a quick summary of the rest:
* Joseph starts taking some of his father's hours as trumpeter, for practice. He and Elzbietka have a conversation where Joseph says - as a joke, but Elzbietka takes him seriously - that if he ever plays the Heynal straight through without stopping at the broken note, it will be a signal to her that something is wrong and she must run straight to Jan Kanty.
* Evil Scarred Tartar Dude, whose name is Bogdan Grozny ("The Terrible") but most people in this area call him Button-Face Peter, runs a raid on the Charnetskis' apartment - getting in by bribing Stas and then refusing to pay up, because NOBODY is nice to Stas in this book - and tries to steal the Shiny Thing, which we will learn later is called the Great Tarnov Crystal, and is a gazing-ball the size of a man's head.
* Kreutz the alchemist overhears Bogdan plotting with Stas and cooks up a scheme to use AWESOME FIREWORKS to foil the Plot. This works. However, once Kreutz sees the Great Tarnov Macguffin being shiny when Bogdan drops it, he steals it for himself! Pan Andrew assumes Bogdan has it; he is depressed to have failed in his Sacred Trust to keep the crystal safe, but figures at least his family won't be attacked anymore, and is not quite as careful.
* Bogdan later traps both Pan Andrew and Joseph in the church tower when they are there together to play the trumpet. Bogdan's hired thugs tie Pan Andrew up, but he forces Joseph to play the Heynal so nobody will know there's a problem. Elzbietka, of course, has been sleepless from worry about her uncle (who is acting weirder and weirder under Tring's repeated hypnosis sessions), and hears when Joseph adds a couple of notes to the Heynal to finish out the tune. It's played four times - north, south, east, west - so she knows he must have done it on purpose, and does indeed run to Jan Kanty through the dark 2am streets. Luckily, Kanty is up, and calls the watch, who rescue Joseph and his father unharmed. Bogdan escapes, but he'll be captured again Because Of Reasons at the proper plotty moment. ;-)
* That's pretty much the climax of the story. Pan Andrew figures out that Bogdan doesn't have the Crystal, because he was demanding it in the church tower; but he doesn't know where it is until, a few weeks later, Kreutz shows it to Tring, who makes him go into a trance gazing at it and demands he find the recipe for the Philosopher's Stone, and Kreutz's overtired brain cooks up a process that ends with GIANT EXPLOSIONS and because Tring is major fail as an alchemist and doesn't realize that will happen, they set like half of Krakow on fire. :P Somehow Tring and Kreutz both escape, though many other people die, and Kreutz has a mental breakdown and wanders the streets holding the Great Tarnov Crystal until Jan Kanty finds him and takes him home for safety's sake.
* And now the king has returned home at this most opportune moment! And Jan Kanty procures an audience with him, and everybody goes before the King - Kanty, Bogdan, Pan Andrew, and Kreutz. The ladies and the dog stay home, with a man from the watch to look after them.
(I would be judgier about this if Elzbietka hadn't gotten to save the day earlier, and if some of the conversations I skipped over hadn't been, for instance, a rather pointed conversation between Joseph and Elzbietka about why can't SHE go to the college too, huh, he doesn't know, she's certainly as smart as any of the boys there. *grin* A whole lot of this book is kind of Telling The Middle Ages How They Should Have Been, though not actually shaking anything up societally.)
* Anyway, so everybody recaps stuff, Bogdan confesses to being an agent of Ivan the Terrible - who's trying to start a war on the eastern front and needs the Tarnov Crystal to pay off the Tartars - and Pan Andrew asks the King to take charge of the crystal, that being part of his oath (to give it to the king if his family could no longer protect it)...
...but Kreutz, cackling maniacally, snatches the crystal from the King's own hands and runs to the brink of the river that curves right around the base of the Wawel castle, where he FLINGS IT IN!!! and yells that now it can't do any more damage. The king agrees, the crystal stays there, Bogdan is banished from Poland and sent to tell Ivan that he really doesn't want to try to steal the crystal from the bottom of the river, and everybody is happy.
* Epilogue: The adult Charnetskis and the Kreutzes moved back to the Ukraine together, while Joseph stayed in Krakow to study. Tring went home to Germany and became known for black magic. Kreutz eventually recovered from his breakdown, with no memory of what he had done, ta-da! Joseph married Elzbietka when they grew up, because of course he did, this is a Standard YA Adventure Novel and you can only have a girl in one of those if she's the love interest. ;P Krakow still exists and so does the church of Our Lady and they still play the Heynal there. "Hark, it is sounding now." The end.
no subject
no subject
If you want to read a good adventure story for young readers involving an alchemist being pressured to produce the shiny stuff, I recommend a 1977 novel by Barbara Ninde Byfield called either Andrew and the Alchemist or The Man Who Made Gold, depending on the edition. (It's probably eligible as a Mock Newbery, come to think of it: Byfield was American.)
(marked by a physical disfigurement so we can tell who he is every time he appears)
Tangential anecdote time!
In the novelization of the Doctor Who story "Invasion of the Dinosaurs", there is a character, working for the bad guys, who is literally marked by a physical disfigurement so we can tell who he is every time he appears: he pops up in several scenes as an anonymous figure before his name is revealed, and the novelist needed to give him a distinguishing mark so the reader could tell it was the same anonymous figure each time.
The neat bit is that after it's revealed that he's working for the bad guys, the Doctor's companion makes a Sinister Scar = Of Course He's The Bad Guy remark -- and immediately regrets it when it turns out that actually he got the scar saving somebody's life in a fire.