'Rilla of Ingleside' by L.M. Montgomery

Or, 'The One set during the Great War'.

Note: If you haven't read this book, beware of spoilers as I've made no attempt to conceal major character deaths and survivals.

The moment in time nobody ever expected crashes down on the Blythe and Meredith families. It's 1914 and the world is plunged into years of war of an entirely vast and unprecedented scope. At one stage, Gilbert remarks that other famous battles from myth and history books have been dwarfed in comparison. The boys all enlist, leaving everyone at home dealing with the desperation and hopelessness of following their progress. Newspapers and telephone calls become things of intense dread. For Anne, the magical half hour before sleep becomes a time of torture. Yet the brave families waiting at home find ways to help with the war effort in their own unique ways, adding to the heroism required from everybody.  

Things I loved even more than before.

1) Dog Monday! I adore this devoted fur ball. He sits at the station and waits 4.5 years for his master to come home, helping his human friends deal with a particularly traumatic crisis in the process. Who could ever forget the powerful moment at the end when Jem Blythe finally steps off the train? I stumbled across an article which described how LMM was asked to do a reading from one of her books before a huge crowd, and chose that reunion scene. As she was reading, LMM apparently dissolved into tears herself, and the atmosphere in that 1920s lecture hall was electric. 

2) Walter! RIP you beautiful boy. He aimed to be an English literature professor but ended up as a dead war hero by the age of 22. His soul's horrific stand against the ugliness and malignity of war is very moving. So is his eventual triumph over terror and inner certainty that the rosiest post-war years could surely never appease him after all he was forced to witness. Walter was born in the wrong era; too pure and sensitive to process the ghastliness of it all. It's heartbreaking to think of all the creative beauty he still had to offer were he to live out his full lifespan. What a waste!

3) Jem! My word, I guess the change we see in this young man reflects the reaction of a bewildered world that hardly knew what hit it. Brought up on colourful tales of the romantic and chivalric side of war, he shoots off as a charged-up, energetic wannabe hero. At the end he hobbles off the train injured, subdued, and worn out way before his time. He'd spent years in the filthy trenches, and months as a prisoner of war, managing to escape a whole lot wiser than he'd ever bargained for. But he still considers it worthwhile to have poured out his strength to make the world a safer place for following generations. It all comes back to love. 

4) Rilla! The positive character development drawn from our title character by the Great War is a major theme. At the start, her mother Anne says she's 'lacking in responsibility and abominably vain.' But Rilla's shallowness and vanity is only along the lines of Amy March's, which I find easy to excuse in a young girl. (I get girls such as these, because I was a youngest sister too.) Rilla's war baby and Red Cross work are always fun to read about. I was glad to see she stuck to her guns and stayed uninterested in pursuing a tertiary education like her siblings. Being resistant to study is a valid choice, and Rilla makes a refreshing contrast to some of LMM's super-academic gals. 

5) The melancholic Miss Gertrude Oliver and her mystical, prophetic, nocturnal dreams. What a fascinating character she is. 

6) Susan! As the Blythes would say, what a brick! Rilla calls her a 'faithful old dear who would lay down her life for any one of them.' I love it when she tries to help Rilla out while she's entertaining Ken Ford. 

What I wasn't a big fan of this time.

1) I can see how the attitudes against Whiskers on the Moon might be problematic for some. Hmm, to my teenage mind, Mr Josiah Pryor was the dodgy blackguard who sympathised with the baddies. That seemed to be just what LMM wanted us to think. But any thoughtful 21st century reader surely has the perspective to step back and observe him with more clarity. The man considers himself a pacifist, yet those around him translate that to mean possible pro-German. Some go so far as to accuse him of being a spy and rejoice when his property is vandalised. I think today, more readers might be ready to sympathise with Whiskers on the Moon's point of view.

But we need to keep the book in its cultural pespective. LMM was writing with great immediacy, and for those whose sons and sweethearts were risking their lives for their country, old Whiskers' attitude was a huge kick in the gut. It was black and white for these people. In my own home city, German place names in the Adelaide Hills were being changed to more innocuous, British sounding alternatives. Anyone of German heritage or suspected of being sympathisers in any way were immediately intercepted, to wipe out any chance of threat. Suspicion was obviously the same in Canada, to the extent that Susan and the Blythes considered it retribution when he suffered a massive stroke! That sure reflects that emotional upheaval going on at the time. 

2) The final part in the story of Rilla's war orphan baby. I've got to wonder how the sudden change in little Jims' circumstances might have affected him. For all his life, the Ingleside folk were his family, then he's suddenly hustled off with a dad and stepmum who are total strangers to him. LMM's account makes it sound as if the transition was as easy as possible on Rilla, but how about Jims himself? Pretty traumatic for a 4-year-old boy I'd imagine, even if he wasn't moving very far away. Oh well, I guess that's another story. At least his stepmother was a nice lady.

3) Bruce Meredith's sacrifice of Stripey the kitten. OK, there is lots of horror from other reviewers about this incident. I was shocked too, but not as much as I was about the attempted murder of Rusty the stray tomcat in Anne of the Island. Bruce had the noblest intentions in mind, and his very action proves that Stripey was the dearest thing he had. He would never have committed such a drastic action for anything less than bringing Jem back, who was still wounded and missing at the time. But whoa, yeah, what a completely misguided action for a minister's son. (If only Nan Blythe had managed to slip in a word of warning to him, after her own attempts to bargain with God in Anne of Ingleside.)

4) Minister's kids weren't supposed to dance! What sort of silliness of the times was that?

5) Shirley's fluctuating age strikes again. In this book, the lucky dude seems to age at a slower rate than everyone else. He's described as 'a lad of 16' at the beginning in 1914, but then LMM has him enlisting in the airforce straight after his 18th birthday in 1917, when he should surely be 19 rather than 18. In fact if he was 18 as LMM claims, that would make him a matter of three months or so older than Rilla! Once again she didn't get her calculations right, making him the shapeshifter of the Blythe family.  

Some great quotes

Susan: Knitting is something you can do even when your heart is going like a trip hammer, and the pit of your stomach feels all gone, and your thoughts are catawampus. 

Walter: Life has always been such a beautiful thing to me, and now it is a hideous thing.

Gertrude: There have been many days when I didn't want to believe in God. I believe in Him now. I have to. There is nothing else to fall back on but God.

Gilbert: Would you have him stay, Anne? Would you have him so selfish and small-souled? (At the outset when Jem enlists.)

Walter: I'm going for my own sake, to save my soul alive. It will shrink to something small and mean and lifeless if I don't go.

Susan: There was a time when I did not care what happened outside of PEI and now a king cannot have a toothache in Russia or China but it worries me. 

Rilla: Perhaps some day a new kind of gladness will be born in my soul, but the old kind will never live again.

Jem: The old world is destroyed and we must build up the new one. It will be the task of years. I've seen enough of war to realise that we've got to make a world where wars can't happen.

Walter (who surely deserves the last word): It will be a better happiness. A happiness we've earned. 

Overall   

I guess we've come to the end, or have we? It's such wonderful family epic in eight books. The way I see it, it's sandwiched between two very significant train station incidents. At the start, we meet our optimistic, red-haired orphan girl, anxious to face the world and give life her best shot. Then finally on a different station platform, we have her tired son, having done that very thing to the best of his abilities. What a privilege to spend hours of my time with the Blythe and Meredith families again. Thank you Anne, Gilbert, Jem, Walter, Nan, Di, Shirley and Rilla! And I mustn't forget Susan. Also John, Rosemary, Jerry, Faith, Una, Carl and Bruce. Here is where I normally say stay tuned, because the next book is coming up. Well, we've sort of come to the end, but do stay tuned anyway, for the bonus Anne series material I have coming. I guess I can't get enough of these guys.  

Extra: I came across a wonderful, authentic, canon-friendly fan fiction to read in conjunction with Rilla of Ingleside. It's a epistolary story told in the form of the letters sent between the Blythe and Meredith boys in the trenches and their loved ones at college and home. We get to keep track of the romances of Jem and Faith, and Jerry and Nan in the loveliest way. The author very carefully wove it in to match the actual text itself, and reading them together was great. If you want to enjoy the experience too, you'll find it here.