Mary Reilly by Valerie Martin Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Mary Reilly
Book Review: Oy vey!
Summary: 2 Stars
I had to read this book for school and boy what a drag it was! This book is so focused on symbolism that it made me want to puke! If your like good literature stick to the classics.Book Review: Stylish; Excellent Heroine; Disappointing Finale
Summary: 4 Stars
"Mary Reilly" is a very smooth and stylish read. It goes down easily. Martin creates a sustained mood of low level suspense.
I cared enough about this book to have been disappointed by the ending, though.
I'd still recommend the book, for its powerful and appealing heroine, and its stylish evocation of Victorian-Gothic Romance -- three contrasting historical periods, but one fun literary genre.
Warning! This review will hint at the book's ending, but will not spell it out. If you are familiar with Robert Louis Stevenson's "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hide," on which "Mary Reilly" is based, you won't learn anything new.
"Mary Reilly" has one of the most riveting openings I've ever read, if not the most. It's a description of an episode of child abuse.
For the first time in my life, I was hooked from the very first line of a novel, and could not put the book down. I had to know what happened to that child -- even though, of course, since the child is the Mary Reilly of the title, I knew that she would survive.
Martin doesn't plunge to the depths of child abuse, but she writes of the surface with such power that I had the feeling that I was in the hands of a master.
Martin deeply impressed me with the terror and vulnerability of the abused child, as well as that child's resilience and drive to survive, and the twisted sadism of the abuser. All in a very few brief words and pages.
But that's just the opening pages.
The bulk of the book is made up of Reilly's crush on her "Master," Dr. Henry Jekyll. Reilly's history of having been an abused child is mentioned as part of the reason why Mary has this crush; like her master, Mary has a horrible, hidden wound that drives her apart from the rest of society.
It's the classic Gothic set-up, enshrined in literature at least since "Jane Eyre." Mary Reilly is a bright, principled, and spunky girl consigned by fate to a lowly life, that of serving her "Master."
Her Master, of course, is intense, mysterious and unconventionly attractive.
Like his spunky young servant, he does not fit into society's pre-ordained classifications.
And he pays an inordinate amount of attention to his servant.
He doesn't make clumsy or lewd passes at her; rather, he watches her, converses with her, confides in her, conspires with her in a way that breaks social expectations, and expresses frank admiration of her intelligence and spirit.
As is traditional in Gothic romance literature, Mary and Master's flirtation consists mostly of muted and aborted conversations. They have to be aborted -- for this upper class doctor and his serving girl to converse is against the rules.
Again, if you've read "Jane Eyre" or the thousand other Gothic romances modeled on it, you've read all this before.
If you enjoyed it in "Jane Eyre," you'll enjoy it here. This reader certainly did.
I did yearn for, and did not encounter, something more, though. This book is more of a novella than a novel; Mary has little to no life outside of her truncated encounters with her Master, and the novel has little to no other plot. This singleness of narrative strand makes the book a quick and easy read, but also something of a lighter read than I wanted it to be.
There is one extra feature here that Martin could have done more with, but she did not. The taboo intimacies between Jekyll and Mary reek of the power abuse of an older, established man of a young and vulnerable woman.
Dr. Jekyll is obviously arousing expectations in Mary that he will never satisfy. He uses her, on her day off, to do some truly vile tasks for him.
How does Martin feel about this? How does the novel want the reader to feel?
Most importantly -- Martin did such a fine job of depicting a believably perceptive, articulate, courageous, spunky, integral creature in Reilly that I never really believed the scenes in which Reilly lets Master walk all over her. I wanted Reilly to at least acknowledge that she knew that she was being used by someone who would probably only hurt her.
Too, Mary was as fetching to me as she was to Dr. Jekyll, and, so, I wanted to spend more time with her, and observe her inhabiting a richer world.
At a certain part in the novel it began to drag, for me; I felt that I'd gotten the point of all these hushed, rushed conversations between Mary, usually on her knees, with her skirts tied up, scrubbing something, and her Master, standing Masterfully over her, observing her carefully, complimenting her, finding some excuse to touch her hand, etc.
And I wanted to something else to happen.
When something else did happen, I was disappointed by that something else. Without revealing the ending, I can say that Mary behaved in a way that went against her every act so far, and that, I felt, betrayed both the spirit of the book, and of the genre.
Part of the point of "Jane Eyre," a book that this book bases itself on as much as on "Dr. Jekyll," is that Jane had so much self-respect that she was not, ultimately, willing to destroy herself to have the man she loved.
Again, I'd still recommend this book. I liked 99% of it so much that I've already "rescued" it by inventing an alternative ending to it, one in which the final Mary we see is more like the Mary of the rest of the book.
Book Review: This is a very deep, very well-written book
Summary: 5 Stars
This is a book about addiction and the binding power of abusive relationships. Martin's writing is gothic and atmospheric, but it would be a shame to read this book as a thriller, a romance, or a sermon on the evils of the class system in Victorian England and miss out on the main point of the book. What Martin is saying about substance abuse is that the addiction is not to getting high, or to enjoying the substance itself, the addiction is to letting out the inner beast. Dr. Jeckyl and Mr. Hyde are both present in all abusers, who use substances to let out the evil inside their souls (not to get rid of it, to enjoy using it). Mary's father used alcohol to let out his demons, and Dr. Jeckyl used his experiments. Women like Mary are bound to them by loyalty, family ties, and love. This is a very deep book and will make you think!Book Review: no title
Summary: 4 Stars
Egrossing novel, especially in the last pages, but I cannot help feeling that it is somewhat of a cheap shot to use a famous classic upon which to build your story. So much of the suspense was already written by Robert Louis Stevenson, that Martin has less to imagine than most authors. Really should have read Jekyll and Hyde first. Martin was obviously a fan of "Upstairs, Downstairs". Probably where she got the idea. Slow moving, but because the reader always knows much more than the novel states, because of the earlier classic, it works. Lots of tidbits about Victorian life and housekeeping. Did Mary's father abuse her sexually? Of course, we think of that in these days, even though Martin really give us no reason to. Well written and plotted.
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