There is a delicious feeling of immersive joy that overtakes any reader when they begin a book and discover in its first sparkling few sentences that not only does it possess the promise of a wholly engaging story that will propel you to turn pages with a fevered anticipatory eagerness but that the author possesses more than enough talent to bring the story suitably alive.
Those kinds of books of rare but such a one is The Misadventures of an Amateur Naturalist by Ceinwen Langley, a novel that uses an old and much-loved tale as inspiration for a breathtakingly original story that will enthrall you, steal your heart and reassure you that you can forge your own way in the world, no matter your circumstances.
Set in 1867, The Misadventures of an Amateur Naturalist is a beautifully told piece of historical fiction that deftly blends in fantastical elements courtesy of a nod to Beauty and the Beast while resolutely unfurling a narrative very much of its own creation.
The protagonist of the novel is Celeste Rossan, a 17-year-old woman in the French port of La Baie Dorée who lives with her shipping entrepreneur father Nicolas and her younger sister Geneviève in comfortably middle class surroundings and who dreams of one day of defying social convention and becoming a naturalist, a field dominated, as is so much else in the nineteenth century, by men.
“That was significant. Étienne never lost a beast he set his mind to killing, or so his admirers liked to say. Lusty as they were, I didn’t believe it was mere fawning. ‘Are you going to keep looking for it?’
‘Naturally. If this truly is a beast nobody’s ever seen before, then I’m going to need its head stuffed and mounted in the entrance of my house.’
I [Celeste] clicked my tongue. ‘A brand new specimen belongs in a museum, not your foyer. It’ll need to be studied.’
‘Then you and all the other scientists will have to come to me and study it,’ he said with an easy smile.” (P. 53)
Celeste is under no illusions that getting into her chosen field will be fiendishly difficult, but such is her love of the natural world and so great her talent at observing and illustrating it that she believes she can surmount the considerable obstacles in her way.
While Geneviève, to whom Celeste is quite close, aspires to mix with the town’s rarefied elite including the Lajoie family which includes the girls’ handsome childhood friend and much in demand bachelor Étienne, Celeste is at her happiest dirty and scuffed out in the wood, sketching birds and beetles and glorying in the magnificent beauty around her.
With her sights set on a forthcoming trip to Paris, her first, which will take in the exciting surrounds of the 1867 Exposition Universelle, Celeste is exuberantly confident, despite the social pressures bearing down on her to embody the ideal woman and get married to a wealthy man, that she can flout convention, drop the “amateur” from amateur naturalist and travel the world satisfying a passion she has nurtured since childhood.
Alas, in the cruel way that it has, life intervenes and her father loses all his wealth, putting the family into a far poorer situation and all but forcing her into a social Faustian pact of which she wants no part but which might be the only way to save her family.
It’s at this point that this lively and well-mannered book, which simmers with all kinds of vivacity and scorn of the established order even as it evokes it with an adroitly-written perfection (not always in a flattering fashion, it should be said), really takes off as Celeste escapes into the woods, an impulsive move that sees her caught inside a rundown chateau in which a large and hairy beast prowls, one she is convinced means to cause her great harm.
It’s at this point that you might realise it’s all starting to look a whole lot Beauty and the Beast-ish.
And to a richly-realised extent it does, but Langley is one of those authors who can take an established idea and very much make it her own, and she does it dazzlingly well with The Misadventures of an Amateur Naturalist, going all out to tell a vibrant tale that surges with a hefty amount of heart, a profoundly refreshing queer sensibility and an empathy for those who don’t, or simply won’t, fit established societal molds.
At first, as you can well imagine, Celeste is frightened by the beast who roams the castle, banging doors and feasting on local wildlife with their remains left scattered in the giant bedroom the 8-foot-tall creature occupies as its own.
But as Celeste gets to know it (and the “it” doesn’t stay an “it” for long as she gets to know her strange host), initially as a focus of naturalist research but later as a interlocutor and a highly-intelligent friend, it becomes readily apparent that life is about to change profoundly for them in ways neither could have imagined.
“‘But I knew when I left home that the life I was choosing would be difficult. I weighed the alternative then, and when I weight it now I come to the same conclusion: that I’d much rather suffer and perish in the pursuit of my own life than wither away in the shadow of someone else’s.’
‘Noble words,’ said the beast. ‘But a noble death is as permanent as any other.'” (P. 468)
The sheer delight of The Misadventures of an Amateur Naturalist comes from the fact that right from the start, Langley infuses the novel with a wondrous sense of rich and compelling humanity.
Celeste is a status quo-defying joy whose growth from nascent dissident to full-throttled upsetter of any and all apple carts especially those to do with sexual and gender roles, is a breathtakingly delight to behold.
You cannot help but fall in love with her intelligence, integrity, love of the natural world and care and concern for others, and as the driver of the fast-moving but always richly thoughtful and highly emotive nuanced narrative, she brings those laudable qualities to every scene in which appears which is of course almost all of them.
She is not just a protagonist; she is a force of life-changing nature, and while it takes her a little while to leave her reticence and caution behind her, once she does, and it is pushed along mightily by an emotionally alive final act, she quickly becomes one of those characters you will not forget quickly.
Alive with superlative writing, vivaciously fully-formed characters and a narrative that is propulsive and engaging and yet never less than thoughtfully affecting, The Misadventures of an Amateur Naturalist possesses an intocatingly immersive story which will stay with you long after you turn the final page, thanks largely to a protagonist who decides she is going to take on the world and win only to find that in fulfilling that lofty goal that she will change more than her own life in the process.