strange and random happenstance

Behind the Shattered Glass by Tasha Alexander
Published by: Minotaur Books
Publication Date: October 15th, 2013
Format: Hardcover, 272 Pages
Rating: ★★★★★
To Buy

Emily and Colin are rusticating and recuperating at Colin's ancestral home Anglemore Park in Derbyshire after the birth of their twins. Aside from a few staffing issues involving their ward Tom their calm is only strained by the continued presence of Emily's mother, Lady Catherine Bromley, and her opinions on child rearing. After another torturous night en famille the calm is finally shattered when a man staggers through the French doors and drops down dead on the Axminster. Thanks to Lady Bromley's obsession with the aristocracy she quickly identifies the victim as the new Marquess of Montagu, Archibald Scolfield, who just happens to be Emily and Colin's neighbor. Emily rushes to Montagu Manor to deliver the tragic news to Archibald's cousin and Emily's acquaintance Matilda who is holding a party for her now deceased cousin. But could Matilda have had a motive for killing Archibald? She inherited all her grandfather's money but the title and the ancestral seat went to Archibald. Could this have strained their cordial relationship? Once Colin convinces the police to let him handle the investigation he vows they will get to the bottom of this crime.

As Emily and Colin dig into Archibald's life his character isn't as upstanding as one would assume. He had two fiancees, one an American buccaneer, Miss Sturdevant, the other the daughter of the local vicar, Miss Cora Fitzgerald. His rapacious attitude toward women might have been the reason for a scandal at Oxford. He ruined his best friend, Mr. Porter, with plagiarism accusations after they toured the continent together. And as for Matilda, who thought she was next in line for the title, in walks Rodney, the heir apparent, a treasure hunter who might be from the wrong side of the sheets. With everyone having a motive and more than a few of them lying Emily and Colin have their job cut out for them. And while they are trying to come to grips with this horrendous crime they have romance blooming under their own roof as their house guest, Simon Lancaster, Earl Flyte, seems to have fallen for their housemaid Lily. Things are precarious enough with a murderer on the loose but a romance crossing classes might be the final straw for everyone.

Every Anglophile of a certain age can trace the origins of their affliction to PBS airing Upstairs, Downstairs in the 1970s. I myself am a second generation sufferer with my parents indoctrinating me throughout my childhood until the whole series became available on DVD and the binge watching commenced. In fact I'd go so far as to say that Downton Abbey succeeded because it tapped into this need of American Anglophiles to root for the denizens of a grand manor house from both sides of the baize door. Behind the Shattered Glass is a break, pun intended, from Tasha's other Lady Emily books in that her secondary story isn't letters, diaries, or correspondence, but a view behind the baize door. We are seeing Emily and Colin from the POV of the servants. But more than that we are a party to their trials and tribulations, their loves and their animosities, we are finally seeing Cook in the kitchen instead of her sending up a menu. Davis the butler isn't just proffering port he's holding court in his chambers. There is just so much more that happens in houses of this period that for the first time in this series we're getting a complete picture instead of just a view upstairs.

While I have seen a few reviews critical of this installment saying the narrative is constricted I would like to firmly refute that by saying a more focused narrative doesn't mean a more constricted narrative. Just look to Gosford Park! A long weekend, a murder, and all the suspects available to us which is the bedrock of so many British mysteries and is a movie I could watch again and again. And much like Gosford Park, Behind the Shattered Glass shines a light on the issues that arise when those from the two different levels of the house interact. This is a powerful book to read in the #MeToo movement because it deals with many facets of consent. Not just sexual consent, though that is the core of this book not just with Archibald Scolfield's predilections when he is away from home, but the burgeoning relationship between Simon and Lily and how they navigate a relationship when one member is viewed as having all the power. But also consent to access someone's personal space. I know Lady Emily is involved in a dire investigation when she searches the servants rooms, but at the same time, it sat badly with me. She was wielding her power over her servants and not being the enlightened employer, showing that even Emily can occasionally stumble.

Which brings everything back to Colin's argument against aristocracy and why he keeps refusing to accept a title from the Queen. Who is anyone to set themselves up as better than their fellow man? Just because they treat their servants well at Anglemore doesn't mean that these people should be stuck being servants forever. There's almost this idolatry going on at Anglemore where all the servants drank the Kool-Aid and just love their work making everything perfect for their masters. What's more they view them as their betters! Hard, physical labor, and yet they love it because they are given basic humane conditions in which to live? This here is showing how the class system really started to fall apart and how the era of the grand country houses would implode. This era needed to end because it wasn't glorious or wonderful, it was hard work that for some is soul crushing. Just look to kitchen maid Prudence! She is miserable and I think she more accurately depicts what life was truly like downstairs. You are cut off from family and friends and work so that others can just live the idle life. Yes, this might be harsh on Lady Emily and the dream of Downton Abbey, but it's the truth!

Which brings me back to Pru. I literally spent the entire book hating her, because there's always that one servant that you hate, hello Thomas Barrow, meet your new BFF since O'Brien fled the coop, Pru! Though I doubt Thomas would talk to her, a kitchen maid being so far below a footman... But there it is, Pru is our Thomas, we are meant to hate her, yet by the end you see her more fully, more clearly, and pity should be your only feeling. She is what the class system made her. For comparison, whenever someone asks me "why are you angry" I think, hang on, I wasn't angry until you insinuated I was and therefore you made me what you thought of me. Pru has been made to be bitter and spiteful! So going back to those critics who call Behind the Shattered Glass constricted, no, it's not, it's you who have a constricted mind. You are unable to see how Tasha is exploring all these different angles of what it means to be a servant and what it means to be a master and how there's not just a symbiotic relationship there but a duty of care, actually in both directions. To say a book that is grappling with all these rather weighty issues isn't dealing with enough I just think you, whomever you are, need to open your mind.

But in today's America a closed mind is more common than an open one and we women, well, we are facing some scary realities. Our rights are in peril so it's nice to look back on historical context and precedent and think, at least we got from there to here so if we have to keep fighting we can. Also, please, go out and vote next week! Back to the book... it's interesting to see historical precedent which occasionally favors women. Because titles going down the male line is total BS. With Matilda it makes sense that she would want her family's title, not just because she was closest to her grandfather, but because she is for women's suffrage. She's Lady Emily on speed. She's throwing bricks and taking names versus trying to gently persuade. So much of this book is showing that change was needed and change was coming but it needed people like Matilda and Emily and Lily and even Pru for that change to happen. A man isn't always right and a patriarchy isn't always the right way. An episode of Magnum, P.I. I was watching the other day had a bumper sticker that said "The right man for the job is a wo-man." Now, I'm not going all militant feminist here, all I want is equality. Therefore can we hear it for Marchioness Matilda? Even if Queen Victoria wouldn't agree.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: #MeToo, Alexander Autumn, Anglophile, Aristocracy, Behind the Shattered Glass, Consent, Downton Abbey, Gosford Park, Magnum P.I., Murder, Patriarchy, Servants, Tasha Alexander, Thomas Barrow, Upstairs Downstairs

The Supernatural Enhancements by Edgar Cantero
Published by: Doubleday
Publication Date: August 12th, 2014
Format: Hardcover, 368 Pages
Rating: ★★
To Buy

Ambrose Wells killed himself. In the same fashion and at the same age his father had thirty years earlier. At twenty-three A. knew nothing of his distant American cousin. Or that Ambrose was rich. Therefore it all came as rather a shock to him to discover that he is the heir of a wealthy estate in Virginia. Axton House and all it's contents, including a butler, are his. A. takes his friend Niamh as his companion on this adventure. A waifish fifteen year old punk with a proclivity to silence. Upon arriving at the rambling house they are struck by the enormity of what lies ahead and by the deep-seated knowledge that the house is haunted. But they aren't people to run away at the first signs of something spooky, such as the butler mysteriously being AWOL. Instead they think logically. They install video cameras, audio recording devices, they keep diaries, dream journals, they keep their Aunt Liza constantly informed of all their activities, because Axton House isn't going to claim them like it did Ambrose and his father before him. Therefore they look into Ambrose's life, his hidden rooms, his mysterious maze, his secret cyphers, his codenamed friends, and try to find the connecting thread. What was Ambrose hiding? Obviously something valuable or important enough for someone to attempt to break into Axton House. Could it have to do with the rumors of a secret meeting that happens every year on the night of the winter solstice? The solstice is fast approaching. They have forty-eight days to uncover the secrets buried with the dead. Will it be enough?

The way The Supernatural Enhancements is written as a collection of diary entries, straight up back and forth dialogue from audio recordings, receipts, scrawled notes from Niamh, letters to Aunt Liza, at 368 pages it's a surprisingly fast read. It's like popcorn, you just keep reaching for that next handful. I devoured this book in three sittings and at each subsequent sitting I felt the quality ebbing away. That immediacy, that need to finish was going out like a riptide and it wasn't coming back. Despite what you might think every time I pick up a book I want it to be a new favorite, a book that I will recommend to all and sundry. Books are almost more exciting before you read them because from that moment you pick them up at the bookstore and take it home and put it on your shelf it's nothing but potential. You don't know how good or bad it's going to be, and that's electrifying. But once the reading commences? The critic in me can't help but keep a running tally of how I think the book is going. Before I forced myself to put aside The Supernatural Enhancements that first night because I was barely able to keep my eyes open it was solidly four stars, perhaps more. The next day, new elements were introduced, the narrative started to wobble, but it could pull three stars still. On my final day, I just didn't care what happened on the eve of the solstice. Turning a lovely Gothic haunted house story into what this book became? Sorry two stars.

All that self-aware humor. All that meta goodness, the video cameras, The X-Files, all of it came to naught. Because I can't shake the feeling that all the different narrative techniques were used just to use them, because in the end all of these devices and nothing untoward was caught on camera? There was no "proof" of anything so what was the point of their stay in Axton House? Yes, there's the outcome, but that was all too hasty, too messy, that didn't fit with the methodical that came before. The book just didn't know what it wanted to be. Was it the story of a haunted house or family secrets or secret societies? What!?! It was too all over the place and at some point I felt the book shifted from self-aware to smug, and that didn't sit well with me. The references, the jokes became too personal too much for the author's amusement, as did the luxuriating in the narrative techniques. Just because you think something is the funniest thing ever doesn't mean that it is. Naming the secret society members after Scooby-Doo villains? Seriously? And the reader will only know this if they bother to decode the cipher at the beginning of the book which also admits to "[stealing] from many others. I apologize if I was not explicit enough." And that right there is the book's downfall. Too much of the other, not enough of the original. The second A. and Niamh entered Axton House I was strongly aware that I recognized the house, it's because it's the antebellum mansion from Hush... Hush, Sweet Charlotte. When a Sinéad O'Connor song starts playing, I was actually astonished that Cantero didn't think that everyone would make The Wonderful Wizard of Oz connection. But he was too busy "stealing" to realize that each reference took the reader out of the book and took something away from his narrative.

But then again, this is a man who thinks it's perfectly fine to have a twenty-three year old man sharing a bed with a fifteen year old girl. Because fifteen is a girl. Not a woman. Not someone who is old enough to make her own choices. I know nothing actually happens between them in that bed and A. is basically an asexual cipher himself, but just what the fuck Cantero!?! Though minus the literal fuck. This is not cool. Just because the girl is constantly seeking something more physical to happen between them making her the aggressor doesn't make it acceptable. Though looking online, because I do try to always backup my rabid attacks, Cantero is from Spain and until the law changed in 2015, otherwise known as a year AFTER this book was published, the age of consent was thirteen. Thirteen!?! Seriously!?! My head hurts just thinking of myself at thirteen and if I was capable of making these big decisions, and I really don't think I was. Yes, I do know many of my classmates were sexually active around then, but with a twenty-three year old? No. Hell no. It was with their peers. And while Niamh gives off a very powerful all-knowing "girl with the dragon tattoo" vibe, that never once takes away from how young she is. In the #MeToo era with these seismic shifts everything from film to literature is going to come under even more scrutiny. Yes, this book is four years old, but I'd like to think that people are good and have moral compasses and that they would go, hang on, this relationship is just weird. Yes, it might have been to unsettle the reader, but for me it was a major problem that I couldn't get past.

The stealing, the Lolita of it all, all these disparate elements brought together, led to the book just ending in a shambles. It's like each and every decision Cantero made took away so much that by the end when the secret society is having their meeting and they all die, oh sorry, spoiler alert, I didn't care. PS you won't either. Who are these multitudes of Ambrose's friends and who are their killers? Nothing is made clear and everything is just a jumble. Our leads go to the house, meet some people, have a party and leave? That is the barest summary of the book and for me there wasn't enough atmosphere and too much thrown at me in the end. There's only so much of hurry up and wait I can take and I was desperately waiting for this book to become just the slightest bit Gothic. Yes, I know I picked it up in the horror section, but a haunted house, by it's very inclusion, indicates that something Gothic is going to go down, and instead this was just a mishmash of things it could have been and things that were better before they were incorporated into another persons work. Is being original that hard? From a recent argument I was involved in online, apparently yes. People don't want to be original they just want to take the best of the work of someone else and claim it's an homage or parody. I do not think those mean what they think those mean. But I think the final straw deals with Aunt Liza. Liza is an abbreviation of Elizabeth, so I have MANY opinions on this topic. Here are things you can and can not do. Elizabeth can create Eliza, Liza, Beth, Liz, Lizzy, but NEVER Betty. It's like that whole John/Jack thing. NOPE. And spare me from people who think that Elizabeth spelled Elisabeth can be abbreviated into Liz or Lizzy. There is no fucking "Z" Elisabeth Moss! Yeah, so maybe I internalized everyone calling her Lizzy at the awards shows the past few months a little too much. But it's been a burden my entire life and it was the final straw for this book.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: #MeToo, Consent, Edgar Cantero, Elizabeth, Going Gothic, Gothic, Hush... Hush, Inheritance, Lolita, Meta, Scooby Doo, Sinead O'Connor, Sweet Charlotte, The Supernatural Enhancements, The Wizard of Oz, The X-Files

Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
Published by: Doubleday Books
Publication Date: March 23rd, 1782
Format: Hardcover, 497 Pages
Rating: ★★
To Buy (different edition than one reviewed)

The Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont were once lovers. Yet their rupture wasn't acrimonious, in fact they are now perhaps closer than ever before. They have a voluminous correspondence telling each other of past, present, and future conquests. Salacious details pepper their letters that they know only the other will appreciate. Though the Marquise is already tiring on Valmont's most recent project. He has sequestered himself out in the country with his aunt because he is trying to bed his aunt's houseguest, Madame de Tourvel. Only he doesn't just want this devout young wife's body, he wants her body and soul. To speed up his conquest the Marquise de Merteuil offers a night back in her bed if he were to quickly accomplish the task and return to her in Paris because she has a job for him. The Marquise's former lover, the only one to ever jilt her, is to be married to the virginal Cécile de Volanges. She thinks it would be just if this young girl just out of the convent weren't so innocent when she reaches her wedding bed and for that she needs Valmont. Yet Valmont stalls and drags his heels, could this cad, this supreme seducer be falling for a little church mouse? Luckily the Chevalier Danceny comes on the scene as Cécile's music tutor. The two young ones fall madly in love and yet neither knows what to do! It will take all the cunning of the Marquise de Merteuil to pull this off, but when Valmont learns that Cécile's mother has been writing vitriol against him to Madame de Tourvel he instantly joins in the plan to take the virtue of young Cécile. Passion, love, seduction, the lives of this small and scheming group are about to change forever with Valmont joining the fray and not all will survive.

If you are a fan of Colin Firth who is a completest, one day, after you've worked your way past such oddities as Femme Fatale, where he stars opposite Billy Zane and Billy's sister Lisa, you will stumble upon Valmont. In fact I would go so far as to say that only those attempting to watch Colin Firth's entire back catalog have seen this misfire of a film. Needless to say this addlepated film was overshadowed by the big screen version of Christopher Hampton's stage adaptation the year before starring Glenn Close and John Malkovich. A film that spent so much money on miscasting that their budget was stretched so thin that all those closeups that were thought artistic were really to hide the fact that they didn't have money for anything beyond a few nice costumes. Combined, these two adaptations left me scratching my head because I could not for the life of me understand why Les Liaisons Dangereuses was a classic, with or without Keanu Reeves. But then I saw a broadcast of the National Theatre Live production of Christopher Hampton's stage adaption starring Janet McTeer, Dominic West, and Elaine Cassidy and everything changed. I finally connected to these characters in the intimate setting of the Donmar Warehouse. I would even go so far as to say of all the "live" theater broadcasts I have seen over the years this one was hands down my favorite. This inspired me to finally read the book and all I am left with is the knowledge that Christopher Hampton is a genius given proper casting, and these characters need to be brought to life by talented actors in order to illicit any kind of emotional response.

The problem is this book is one of the most famous epistolary novels that wasn't written by Samuel Richardson. It's not the fame that's the problem it's the form. Epistolary novels over the centuries have expanded to not just be diaries or letters but here we're limited to the letter and Laclos likes to leave a little bit of a mystery. So instead of being extremely intimate, which is what a successful epistolary novel does, letting us into the character's innermost thoughts, the letters purposefully muddy the waters. Characters say one thing to one person and the exact opposite to another but they are both written in the same voice so there is no way to tell what the truth is even if there is a truth. This means you take the characters at face value, what they say is who they are, there are no lines to be read between and you're only sure of one thing, they all come across as dicks. On top of that these characters are interacting with each other between their correspondences and we never really hear what happens except in passing. This leads to the reader being distanced from the characters because of the elliptical way their story is being told. So if you weren't alienated by the characters being assholes, you're alienated by an author who thinks he's being clever. That is why this book works better adapted into another format. Taking the best of the material at hand and making it into conversations instead of having characters sitting in chairs on stage or screen and just reading and writing letters. Giving the story definition and having actors that are able to sell it. Because a good actor can make you root for a bad character any day.

The transference into another medium also helps in eliminating the book's other problem, it's overwritten. Seriously, send an editor in STAT. Again and again the characters go back to the same things, the same arguments, the same platitudes of love, on and on and on and if I read the word chimerical one more time I will scream. If you've read one letter from Valmont to Madame de Tourvel you've literally read them all. Valmont: I love you! Madame de Tourvel: Please don't say that. Over and over and over. The forward progress of the narrative is so infinitesimal that after a time you think nothing is going to happen. I mean, I knew that Valmont was to seduce naive young Cécile and it took FOREVER to get to that point. I'm not joking when I say that took HALF the book to happen. All told there are 175 letters over five months and almost all the action happens at the very end. In fact the big moments are almost swept under the carpet! Valmont's death is just, and he's dead! The Marquise de Merteuil's fate is basically a postscript! This book needed someone like Christopher Hampton to come along and slap it into shape, because Miloš Forman and Jean-Claude Carrière sure made a hatchet job with Valmont. Oddly enough the only forward momentum is not momentum at all but reminiscences. The stories of past conquests and bizarre take-downs that the Marquise de Merteuil and Valmont share are the only lucid and succinct storytelling in all 500 pages of this book. And those stories don't exactly make for the best reading, as it's the destruction of lives and the stealing of virtue.

And virtue is indeed stolen. That is my biggest hangup with Les Liaisons Dangereuses, does consent mean nothing? Again, this is why seeing it on stage or screen works, because the actors can give a look, perform an action, that changes what is being said. Yet here the correspondence is in black and white, there is no middle ground, and to me Cécile is forced into a sexual relationship with Valmont, both from his actions and the Marquise de Merteuil's peer pressure. While Laclos is again elliptical, what you gather is that Valmont rapes Cécile and then she enters into a relationship with him against her will and her heart's desire. This isn't cool people. This isn't right. While I said that an adaptation can create a middle ground to what is happening I want to make it VERY clear that in life there is no middle ground when it comes to consent. I think this was the most shocking discovery to me in reading this book, I knew the lead characters were not likable people, but I thought that their liaisons were based more on seduction than blunt force. The number of times that poor Madame de Tourvel says no and is ignored? What I took to be the central love story that reformed Valmont is nothing more than a man not realizing that no means no and his target becoming so worn down she gives up. And while reading this book at any time would have made me point these problems out, in this day and age with the Time's Up movement and #MeToo, I was struck by how this book revels in the very worst in humanity. Consent should be enthusiastic and no should always, ALWAYS, mean no.

But I wonder if perhaps that's why it was so controversial at the time. Did people behave like this or were they scandalized to think people could behave like this? Or was this just showcasing the lax morals of the previous generation that was about to be overthrown through revolution? That notion actually playing into the recent revival by the National Theatre. While this book is still very scandalous, I don't think that is the reason why it is a classic. The reason why Les Liaisons Dangereuses has lasted is that it's humor, underneath all the horrors, is wry and arch. The book has a humorous self-deprecating style wherein the characters actually comment on Danceny being the hero of the tale, and oh, such a dud of a hero. Like Thackeray's Vanity Fair it's a book where the anti heroine and hero are the compelling characters. You get a vicarious thrill to think of someone destroying another for sport, but in the end you get the added thrill that the assholes get their due. Because THAT is the key when you have unlikeable characters. If these reprehensible examples of human life don't get what's coming to them it's just glorifying their existence. Because they pay for their sins the scales balance in the end. Which makes me really want to sit down with Laclos and ask him what his personal opinions were on issues of consent because you have to wonder, what with Valmont dying and the Marquise de Merteuil getting smallpox, losing an eye, and being shunted off to Amsterdam where something too horrid to mention happens, if he was actually just wanting to write something salacious that would sell and in the end it rather ambiguously states his real opinions through death and disfigurement.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: #MeToo, Colin Firth, Consent, Dominic West, Epistolary, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, National Theatre Live, Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, Rape, Sweet Reads, Thackeray, Time's Up, Valmont, Vanity Fair