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We celebrated a new year of Page Turners with a change in location this month. Due to renovations at the Central Library, the group met at the North Garland Branch Library, where we will continue to meet through part of the spring.
This month we read Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain, which received a bit of a cool reception. Several group members enjoyed the book, seven gave it a thumbs up vote, but these reactions were tempered by an equal number of readers who either voted thumbs down, three, or sideways, four. We also had a few members abstain from voting pending completion.
The group was split over two different ways of defining the novel. One faction saw it as a love story consisting of two tales of survival. The other section described the novel as primarily a story of war. Personally, I found Cold Mountain to be a bit of both. The novel took place during the Civil War and many of its characters are soldiers, some with haunting memories of the fighting. However, apart from some of Inman’s recollections, readers did not encounter many scenes of battle. The bulk of the story detailed his sweetheart, Ada’s attempts to survive on her family’s farm and his own efforts to walk back to her, wounded in more ways than one.
As with the split over the type of story, the group was also divided on the subject of the characters. Some Page Turners really liked the characters, particularly Ada and Ruby. They liked the presence of strong women in the novel and enjoyed reading from their perspective. Many of us were impressed by Ada’s transformation and her growing friendship with Ruby. We were pleased that she was able to put her city pretensions behind her and make survival her priority. She also formed an excellent partnership with Ruby, treating her as an equal from day one. One reader compared their relationship to a kind of marriage, each sharing their strengths with the other.
Despite this admiration for the two women, some of the group members found the characters hard to relate to. We received some insight into Inman’s state of mind regarding the war and Ada as he walks, and a few of Ada’s memories of him and her father were supplied. However, I wondered about their relationship for a large portion of the book. Until the scene where Ada read one of Inman’s letters I doubted whether she even liked him and thought perhaps the affection was all on his side. Another Page Turner questioned whether or not “she even knew this guy”. With these doubts in mind we found it a little difficult to become invested in the main characters, although amusingly, everyone in the group agreed that they could have taken or left Stobrod, Ruby’s father.
Despite a few readers still plowing through the books, we went ahead and discussed the ending, thereby spoiling it for them. Due to the vague description in the final chapters, not everyone was clear on how Inman died. Having dispatched Ada and Ruby ahead to the farm, Inman and Stobrod encountered Teague and some other members of the Home Guard on their way back to Black Cove. They were able to subdue all but one of the Guard, an young adolescent. Inman tried to talk the boy into handing over his gun so that he did not have to shoot him, but the boy refused and ended up shooting Inman. Ada heard the shot and ran back in time to hold Inman before he died.
Although many of us were not that invested in the characters, Inman’s death still shook us all. We understood that a novel could lose some of its potency if everything was resolved happily, but it still seemed unfair that Stobrod survived his wound while Inman himself survived previous gunshots to the head and neck only to die from a chest wound shortly after his reunion with Ada.
As the meeting wound down we moved on to topics more loosely connected with the book. One of these was the Confederate legacy which remained after the war. One Page Turner grew up in North Carolina and said she definitely felt some of the tensions amongst the people, even half a century later.
This Page Turner and another recently travelled to Gainesville with the Senior Center. While there they visited the courthouse, where they learned about the Gainesville Lynchings. Apparently, in 1862, forty men who supposedly held Union sympathies were hung in Gainesville, after being condemned by a questionable group of citizens.
Our final topic of discussion was the film version of Cold Mountain. I could not remember if it ended the same way as the book, but another reader recalled that it had. She also pointed out that the Swanger sons played a larger role in the film, returning to the family farm at the film’s conclusion. We also joked about the nationalities of the three lead actors. Nicole Kidman, was an Australian, Jude Law was from Britain, only one, Renee Zellweger, was an American southerner!
As usual copies of next month’s selection were available for checkout after the meeting. We will meet again at the North Garland Branch Library on February 24, at which time we will discuss Maeve Binchy’s novel Heart and Soul.
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