Despite her fame, the web waves are ruled by Amazon. We opted for the 5-disc collector's edition of a Canadian television version offered by Sullivan Entertainment, which for some reason came in Dutch packaging. Fortunately, the original English soundtrack survived and the Dutch packaging, apart from the words, was very like an English packaging and we were able to play the things. So we got three films, which may have been episodic in origin, one corresponding to the original and most famous book, one drawn from a number of follow-on books and one made up by the film people. I think it is fair to say that, as one might expect, the first film was best and the last was still good but starting to struggle a bit, being reduced to a cloak and dagger sub-plot, a sure sign of a television series which is running out of puff. But one which has held its price quite well, with the collector's edition coming in at more than £20. The demand must still be there.
For a girlie story, I got on with it quite well; a fine bit of North American syrup which warmed the heart. Amongst other things, a Canadian version of our own Jane Austen adaptations. But like in those adaptations, it is hard to strike the right note with the film setting. The idea is that Anne was mostly raised on a small farm. The catch was that this small farm seemed to support a very genteel life style with no apparent effort. There was a lot of cooking but there were no dearths and no plagues. There didn't seem to be much in the way of farm labourers. There didn't seem to be much in the way of farm animals. Whereas I would have thought that small farms in Prince Edward Island would be like small farms in the rest of the world, then and now, unremitting hard work, often ending in disaster of one sort or another, at the very least falling into the hands of the money lenders. But perhaps I have missed the point: perhaps life was hard in turn of the century (1900 not 2000) rural Canada and people did not need to be told about that. They wanted a fairy story to cheer them up, a bit in the way that we went in for very jolly films during and after the second world war. Lots of song, dance and fluff and certainly none of the kitchen sink stuff to which we moved during the sixties, when the miseries and horrors of the war were safely behind us.
I dare say that the books are not quite the same, perhaps being a bit less sugary, a bit more realistic and bearing the same relation to the adaptations as the Jane Austen books do to theirs.
I note in passing that the stories appear to contain a lot of autobiographical material, to the extent of the heroine, Anne, becoming a writer of books drawn from her, that is to say both the heroine's and the author's, background in Prince Edward Island. Something one gets just a bit of in our own Agatha Christie, who is, for example, self indulgent to the extent of introducing slightly eccentric lady crime writers into some of her later books, all following the self-regarding tradition of the bard who was quite fond of introducing sub-plays into his super-plays.
We also got a Vintage paperback of the original book, helpfully packaged with a glossary, recipes and other collateral material. So having done the DVD's and BH being engaged with the book, I was moved to go back to the internet and persevered through Amazon to get a choice of three important web sites.
There is the place itself, commemorated for tourists at http://www.tourismpei.com/anne-of-green-gables.
There is the museum at http://www.annemuseum.com/. Not sure what standing this has in the Gabular world.
And then there is the author herself at http://www.lmmontgomery.ca/. which seems to be a much less commercial version of http://www.agathachristie.com/. The shrine proper.
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