strange and random happenstance

Why was this on PBS!?! No really, I want to know, why was this on PBS!?! It was made by Amazon. It was released on Amazon. It was still on Amazon when PBS aired it eight months after it dropped and instead of having to wait seven weeks to realize this series was going nowhere you could have sat on your couch for almost seven hours and come to the same conclusion. This is actually worse than when Masterpiece randomly airs feature films because at least in some of those cases, especially in the early nineties, people didn't have access to those films. So while it felt like cheating just airing someone else's work, at least it was with the interest of their viewers in mind. Whereas here!?! Everyone has access to Amazon. Literally everyone. I could have forgiven them this weird decision if the show actually was something. But it isn't. This show is nothing. The Collection has an amazingly talented cast but the story, what was the story!?! Was it about the Sabine fashion house being Nazis collaborators? Was it about the family's complete ineptitude at covering up a murder? Which makes me think that they couldn't have been collaborators because they were just too damn stupid and they so would have been caught. You don't bury a body in the backyard of a house you own! And then, when it's discovered, you don't move it! Nothing here is straightforward. Everything is told in the most roundabout and confusing manner possible. For example, one of the girls in the seamstress shop secretly had a baby. Yet the father of the baby appears to be the closeted brother played by Tom Riley who's the genius behind the house's designs. How did he hook up with a woman? Especially when his current boy toy is fertilizing his mother's garden in the country? Well, your guess is as good as mine. Because, they don't tell us. Even if this show hadn't been rightly cancelled I don't think they would have ever given us answers. They were too interested in things looking pretty, the costumes just so, the photographs in the vein of Funny Face, just right. The irony of a show about fashion being all surface isn't lost on me. Though I honestly think it's lost on them. I really think they thought they were making something important, something of worth, something that made a statement. That statement was look how easy it is to waste Amazon's money. The only thing I am here for is that we are firmly in the era where Frances de la Tour is choosing her roles based on how much she gets to sit around and what delicious foods she gets to eat. She's doing a Maggie Smith, with just as barbed a tongue, but a lot more noms. Vanity Fair, Professor T, she's just living her best life. Sadly, this show wasn't up to her abilities, but at least I could take solace that at least someone enjoyed this series, because I sure as hell didn't.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Amazon, Fashion, Fifty-Five Years a Masterpiece, Frances de la Tour, Funny Face, Murder, Nazis, Nazis Collaborators, Paris, Photography, Post War Era, Professor T, Richard Coyle, The Collection, Tom Riley, Vanity Fair, Vichy France

I can't be the only one who knows Catherine de' Medici from the guilty pleasure that was Reign. Yes, yes, I know, I did know vaguely who she was before than but needless to say, I was intrigued by this new series and was sold once I heard that Charles Dance was playing Pope Clement. The weird thing about this adaptation is that while it obviously has better production values than the CW could afford, there's still a bit of a low budget feel to it. This though could be due to the bizarre music choices that start and end each episode, much like the 2018 adaptation of Vanity Fair, or the arch knowing tone that wants to be Gentleman Jack and fails. Yet, it still has charm. The driving force though is really just waiting for Catherine to go full on serpent queen and embrace the dark side. To watch her line up the pawns and knock them all down, getting exactly what she wants. Yet she's willing to play the long game and thankfully in the meantime we have Ludivine Sagnier as Diane de Poitiers. Diane was the mistress of Catherine's husband Henri. Diane had a lot of power and spent a lot of time rubbing this in Catherine's face. But Ludivine who I previously admired on The Young Pope/The New Pope, plays a character you love to hate so perfectly she is what I envision Catherine will become, well maybe not bathing in gold, but you never know. This back and forth between the two women, and later between Catherine and her daughter-in-law Mary, is really at the heart of the show. Women vying for what power they can hold onto. Which made my mind just explode. Because I just realized that ANY royal historical drama could never pass the Bechdel Test. Did these women EVER talk about anything other than men or how they will derive power due to their male protectors? No they did not. It's all men and marriages and alliances and male heirs and men men men. Seriously, why have I never noticed this before? This is brought home even more here because all the main stars of the show are female yet everything is about the men. And the star with top billing is Samantha Morton. I'm not sure I really get how she's approaching this character. She's playing the role very quiet, very reserved, and oddly very love-struck. The weird mystical aspects are shoved off onto Ruggieri, played by one of my favorite actors, Enzo Cilenti. But Catherine is almost a nonentity. She is the spider at the center of the web, but only because she's worked her way there slowly and methodically. I think more than anything that is why this show got a second season, viewers need to see her at the height of her power, not some woman barely holding onto her marriage, or a baby factory, or a widow, she needs to seize control. And the last two episodes showed us what's coming. France and Catherine's enemies better hold on tight.

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Labels: Alison Bechdel, And the Emmy Goes To, Bechdel Test, Catherine de' Medici, CW, Diane de Poitiers, Enzo Cilenti, Gentleman Jack, Ludivine Sagnier, Reign, Samantha Morton, The Serpent Queen, Vanity Fair

A Question of Numbers by Andrea Penrose
Publication Date: April 8th, 2019
Format: Kindle, 378 Pages
Rating: ★★★
To Buy

Saybrook and Arianna are doing his uncle, Lord Mellon, a favor. The alliances needed to defeat Napoleon are tenuous at best and everyone in London is on tenterhooks. Therefore when Lord Mellon is approached by a Prussian saying that he has proof of someone working against the alliance and that he will only speak to Arianna it's the least Arianna can do to hear this man out. After all Arianna still feels bad they weren't able to stop Napoleon from leaving Elba and she'll do what needs to be done to save more lives. But the Prussian, a delightful man who loved Shakespeare, Count Grunwald, is murdered before their rendezvous. Perhaps by a deadly assassin. Arianna doesn't know who the Count suspected but he thankfully left clues knowing that his own life was in danger. One of the clues is quite shocking. Saybrook and Arianna have often been forced to work with Lord Grentham. Lord Grentham's second in command, Pierson, was assumed killed during their previous mission on Elba. But the signet ring that Count Grunwald was clutching would indicate otherwise. This means that if Pierson were to break at the hands of his inquisitors the alliance could be lost as he holds a key piece of information that could turn the tide of war. Saybrook and Arianna though are more worried about rescuing their friend. Because if the French need leverage against Pierson they are sure to find it in Brussels, where Pierson's illegitimate daughter Emma is residing. The French are sure to seek her out so Saybrook, Arianna, and their whole crew, as Aunt Constantina and Sophia also insist on accompanying them, are heading to Brussels, to rescue a girl, and if they're lucky, her father as well. But in the whirl of the beau monde as they try to eek out one more day of pleasure as war comes swiftly on cats paws can Saybrook and Arianna find the truth or will they be distracted by spectacles and riddles that prove enigmatic. And what about the woman from Sandro's past, Paloma Marone-Cinzano? Is she a friend or a foe? And who is the father of her child?

I recently got around to watching the 2018 Vanity Fair miniseries, which aside from the weird musical choices at the end of each episode is probably my favorite version now, and I was once again struck with the weird dichotomy of the Battle of Waterloo happening mere steps away from the ton partying in Brussels like there's no tomorrow. But in fairness there might not have been a tomorrow, as Wellington himself said it was "the nearest-run thing you ever saw in your life." It's so hard to wrap one's head around this luxurious and ostentatious lifestyle happening concurrently with Napoleon cutting a swath through the continent during the Hundred Days. "Heaven forfend that the prospect of death and destruction interfere with the beau monde’s pleasures." Like many people my first introduction to the Regency era was through the works of Jane Austen, so my Napoleonic history was sketchy, at best. Which is one of the reasons I took British History in college, I wanted to know more. But my first introduction to Waterloo was actually via Thackeray's classic Vanity Fair. And I really thought it was fiction and not truth. I mean, seriously, this is an example of truth being stranger than fiction. Which is what I love about A Question of Numbers. Andrea Penrose perfectly captures this weird world that feels fictitious. The sojourns to the park to take a stroll and get the latest gossip on the impending invasion. You know, just a normal day. But Andrea really brings home the dark underbelly that is hidden beneath the balls and the ballgowns. All the nefarious dealings and struggles of spy versus spy. All the little players who played their part and, with a bit of luck, brought home a British victory at the cost of so many lives. In fact I couldn't help but feel that this volume of Arianna and Sandro's adventures was a bit of a Russian epic. That fighting despite the futility of war, though thankfully without any of our leads ending up under a train.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: A Question of Numbers, Adaptation, Andrea Penrose, Arianna Hadley, Battle of Waterloo, Brussels, Elba, Lord Grentham, Napoleon, Prussians, Regency Romp, Sandro, Spies, Thackeray, The Duke of Wellington, Vanity Fair

Dorothy Parker is easily the most quoted American author known for her caustic wit and sharp tongue. An American Oscar Wilde, if you will. She had the brains and the bite. Dorothy Rothschild, not those Rothschilds, was born in New Jersey but quickly whisked back to New York, so as she could be a true New Yorker. Once her mother died her relationship with her father was contentious until his death when she was twenty. A year later she sold her first poem to Vanity Fair, a magazine she would eventually work at after a two year stint at Vogue. In fact she'd bounce around the various New York publications, from The New Yorker to Esquire and all those in between, for many years, though it was her work as the theatre critic for Vanity Fair, where she was filling in for P.G. Wodehouse when he was on vacation, that made her career take off. This time in her life was centered around her lunches at the Algonquin Round Table. She held her own as one of the few women at a table of (almost) equally smart and wisecracking male colleagues.

As a member of the Algonquin Round Table she became famous as much for her biting remarks as for her brilliant writing. A prolific poet and critic, Dorothy published more than 300 poems in the 1920s. The collection of her writing, The Portable Dorothy Parker, has never gone out of print. Her romantic life was a bit of a roller-coaster, marrying Edwin Parker just before he was deployed in the Great War, by the time he was demobbed their marriage was over. Numerous affairs led to a pregnancy, an abortion, and her first suicide attempt in that order. She had slightly better luck with her second husband, Alan Campbell, even if at times it was tempestuous their union brought about two Oscar nominations for Best Writing-Screenplay. The looming second war brought out Dorothy's political side, she took up pet political causes, and numerous pets, and eventually bequeathed her literary estate to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. After his assassination her estate passed to the NAACP. For her tombstone epitaph she suggested “Excuse My Dust.”

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Bright Young Detectives, Dorothy Parker, Esquire, Excuse My Dust, New York, Oscar Wilde, Oscars, Roaring Back to Reading, The Algonquin Round Table, The New Yorker, The Portable Dorothy Parker, Vanity Fair, Vogue

Heather Rose Jones is an interesting mix of modern and historical. Be it biotech or linguistics, she seems perfectly suited for whatever time period she lands in if a time machine were to show up on her doorstep and take her on a journey. Her early life was far flung, from the various corners of the continental United States to several European countries, though she currently calls the Bay Area home. Growing up in an academic family surly spurred her passions for research and teaching. She loves "to share my knowledge with anyone who will stand still long enough to listen." Though who knows how long that would be given her fascinating and diverse interests! Heather has a BS in zoology, after which she spent a decade in medical research, only to go back to school for a PhD in Linguistics from U.C. Berkley where she specialized in the semantics of Medieval Welsh prepositions. While she might have come to my attention due to her fiction writing, I'm amazed at the sheer scope and dedication to all her various interests.

Her "Skin Singer" series of short stories have appeared in Marion Zimmer Bradley's Sword and Sorceress anthologies, but you can surly guess by now that she wouldn't limit her prodigious talents and interests to just one writing outlet. Heather has written for many non-fiction publications as well on topics ranging from biotech to historic costume to naming practices. As for her Alpennia books, think of them as historical fantasy with a detailed belief system with lesbians. In fact her passion project is the Lesbian Historic Motif Project she began to change the unexamined assumptions about the place and nature of lesbian-like characters in historic fact, literature, art and imaginations. She is also a total geek for historic textiles and clothing, making little doll reproductions of archaeological clothing finds. Is it any wonder with these passions coupled with geeking out over linguistics, historic cooking, and much more that she is a member of the Society for Creative Anachronism? There she's known by a far more Welsh handle than Heather, she's Tangwystyl verch Morgant Glasvryn. I should just let Heather, or should I say Mistress Tangwystyl verch Morgant Glasvryn, take the wheel.

Question: When did you first discover Jane Austen?

Answer: I have a sheepish confession that I read her books well after I’d fallen in love with a number of movie treatments and with the Regency romance genre in general. I was certainly aware that she was the ur-text on which the genre was based. And it isn’t as if I had any aversion to reading novels of the era. (I read Thackeray’s Vanity Fair just for fun back in 1975, after all.) I’m still working on getting a complete collection of the works of Georgette Heyer.

But at some point about 15 years ago I realized I’d never actually read Austen herself, so I marched off to the bookstore and picked up a complete set and read them all straight through. I certainly have my favorites and my less preferred works. (I seem to be alone among my friends in liking Emma, but every time I re-read Mansfield Park, I want to throw it across the room.) I also have audio versions of my favorites in heavy rotation on my anti-insomnia program. (My favorites are the free recordings at Librivox.org, and my favorite narrator is Karen Savage.)

Question: What do you think Jane Austen would think of her impact with so many literary offshoots, from parody to pastiche?

Answer: I tend to be wary of trying to second-guess authors’ attitudes. Even the authors I know personally can surprise me in their take on questions like this. Given the circumstances of her life, I can guess that one of her reactions might be, “Gee, I wish I could have gotten a cut of the take!” I suspect she might be astonished that her work is remembered at all two centuries later. But I refuse to guess at what she might think of all the people re-purposing her stories in the vastly different ways we’ve seen. People have very individual and emotional reactions to that sort of thing, and all of them are valid.

Question: Where do you get your inspiration from?

Answer: My stories are, at heart, the stories I wish other people had written so that I’d have been able to read them at important points in my life. So I’m inspired by the echoing gaps in my literary life that are begging to be filled. I’ve spent most of my life searching through bookstore and library shelves for books that recognize and respect core aspects of my identity: being a woman, being a geek, being a lesbian, being an intellectual. One gets very tired of being told implicitly that one doesn’t exist, or at least, that one isn’t worthy of being included in stories.

On a more practical basis, I’m inspired by the life-long love of European history that began when I spent a year in Prague at the age of ten. (My father was a university professor on sabbatical.) I love immersing myself in the everyday material culture of places, times, and peoples different from my own.

Question: What makes the early 19th century mesh so well with magic?

Answer: Is is heresy for me to say that I don’t think there’s anything special about the early 19th century that makes it suited to magic? Every age, every culture, and every literary genre inspires particular flavors and approaches to magic. I think that the existing popularity of the Regency setting (and of the Regency romance genre in general) made it inevitable that fantasy writers who loved that setting would look for types of magic that fit into it well.

I think some of the key characteristics of Regency magic have to do with the eras and movements it balances between. The Industrial Revolution creates some major challenges for designing a magical world. Do you view it as a threat to pre-industrial magic or as a context for a new industrial-based magic? The social and political shifts in Europe from the remnants of old-style monarchy to more populist governments similarly present a challenge to motifs of magic as an echo of aristocracy or as the basis for a “everyman makes good” plot. To the extent that magic is viewed as anti-rational, any 19th century understanding of magic needs to be in dialog with the 18th century Age of Enlightenment and its consequences for philosophy and religion.

Questions of this sort exist for any historic setting. A Renaissance magic setting will similarly be driven by and need to deal with the social and technological changes in which it operates. The entire genre of Urban Fantasy asks the question of what magic can look like in our current world. So to return to my original answer, I don’t think magic necessarily meshes better with a Regency setting in comparison to other eras. But the setting will certainly generate a particular flavor of magic unique to that era.

Question: The world building and system of magic varies greatly in the regency fantasy genre, how did you go about creating yours?

Answer: I had the setting before I decided/realized it was going to include magic. (The very first ideas for the Alpennia books were much more along the lines of an ordinary historical romantic adventure.) I wanted a form of magic in which it would make sense that the existence of magic hadn’t created massive divergences from our own timeline and historic development. So I looked to existing mystical themes in history and asked, “What if, sometimes, for some people, this actually worked the way that people at the time believed it worked?”

In Daughter of Mystery, the main magical focus is religious in nature. I started with the proposition: what if aspects of folk religion, and especially the folk-religious aspects of the cults of the saints in Catholicism, were a bit more...functional than they are in our world? What if some people could work “miracles” fairly reliably? But what if the nature of those miracles was such that it was impossible to turn them into a science? It was also important to me to treat the religious basis of the magic in a respectful way. As an atheist, it meant the world to me when various of my Catholic friends told me I’d “gotten it right.”

In the world of Alpennia, people have varying levels of ability of magical causation. Some have none; some have so little that you’d need a lot of people working in concert to make anything happen; and very rarely some people have enough ability to produce “miracles” on their own. But alongside this, I imagined that the ability to detect miracles was similarly distributed. Some people can’t see anything unless it has a direct visible manifestation--and most often that could be explained away as chance or coincidence. Some people can perceive the workings of magic itself in sensory form: visions of the forces at work, auditory or tactile sensations. Very rarely, someone has both the ability to work magic and to see the mechanisms by which it works well enough to develop their talents into a reliable practice. If they have the proper guidance. And if society thinks it’s appropriate for them to do so. And if the results of their efforts don’t cause them fatal problems.

Channeling the understanding and practice of magic through religious ritual both created a context for passing along “effective” practices, but also for diluting them into mere rote ceremony. So I had my context in which there was the possibility of a particular individual having and developing significant magical skills, but where that possibility didn’t translate into the development of a “technology of magic”.

In later books, we see that religion isn’t the only context in which the magic in my world manifests. The Mystic Marriage centers around alchemy--a field that my characters treat as if it were purely scientific, but where it’s clear to the readers that the same mystical forces that lie behind miracles are driving the results of alchemical experiments. In my current work in progress, Mother of Souls, we see mystical forces being channeled through other practices such as music and art. But in all cases, the effects can range from barely perceptible to world-shaking, depending on the practitioners and the practice.

Question: If you had to choose between writing only period literature or only fantasy literature, which would win?

Answer: I’ve always refused to accept false dichotomies. I’ve spent most of my writing life feeling like I had to choose between writing characters like me and writing characters that I could sell stories about. Or between writing the stories I wanted to read and writing the stories other people wanted to read. When I had the finished manuscript of Daughter of Mystery in hand, I had to make the very important choice of whether to try to publish it as a mainstream fantasy novel or as a lesbian novel. I refuse to be boxed. I’ve sold purely historic stories (“Where My Heart Goes”, a historical romance short story set in 16th century Italy). I’ve sold purely fantasy stories (the “Skinsinger” series in the Sword and Sorceress anthology series). And I’ve sold historic fantasy set in both the Regency and medieval periods. I will not erase any part of my writing self, not even just for fun in a quiz.

Question: Be honest, have you ever dressed up in Regency clothes just to pretend for a moment you are in the past?

Answer: I’ve been deeply involved in historic re-creation for the last 40 years. In terms of organized events, it’s been mostly in the Society for Creative Anachronism, but I’ve worn costumes from Bronze Age Denmark and pharaonic Egypt all the way up through the 1930s. I love participating in historic themed “set pieces”, especially dinners and similarly structured events. I’ve prepared historic meals scattered over several millennia. (You should see my historic culinary library!) At Worldcon last year, I brought some Alpennian pastries as refreshments for my author’s kaffee klatch, based on a French cookbook of the same era. But I confess, I haven’t yet made a specifically Regency-era outfit. I have the fabric sitting in my stash and I know exactly which dress from my books I want to make. It’s just a matter of time and of having the excuse of what to wear it for.

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Labels: Daughter of Mystery, Heather Rose Jones, Jane Austen, Lesbian Historic Motif Project, Linguistics, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Mystic Marriage, Prague, Regency Magic, SCA, Sword and Sorceress, Vanity Fair, Welsh

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

Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen
Published by: Little Books Ltd
Publication Date: 1817
Format: Hardcover, 240 Pages
Rating: ★★★★★
To Buy (different edition than one reviewed)

Catherine Morland isn't like the Gothic heroines she loves to read about; her name is prosaic, she's a content and happy girl who could never think badly of anyone and is surrounded by a big family who love her. But more importantly, alas, she's never even been to a crumbling castle or monastery let alone to the South of France where she could be held hostage. Her first real adventure is when her kindly and wealthy neighbors, the Allens, invite Catherine to accompany them to Bath. Mrs. Allen views Bath in the first few days of their residence as rather boring as they have no acquaintances, but that is soon about to change. Catherine's first acquaintance is a Mr. Henry Tilney, a lovely young man who dances with her and disappears. Her second acquaintance appears as if she'll be around longer. Isabella Thorpe is the daughter of an old classmate of Mrs. Allen and they soon become fast friends. It transpires that Isabella's brother John is friends with Catherine's brother James, and soon Isabella is confiding her feelings for James to Catherine all while trying to get Catherine and John together. But despite just one night Catherine's heart already belongs to Henry Tilney. Luckily for her he soon returns to Bath, bringing along his sister Eleanor and his rather forbidding father. As is often the case with young girls battle lines are drawn, Isabella wants Catherine to be hers alone now that she has become engaged to James, yet Catherine is defiant and sticks to the Tilneys. In fact Catherine shortly leaves Bath with the Tilneys for their ancestral home, Northanger Abbey. All the complications of Bath are behind Catherine, but will she create her own obstacles in the Gothic surroundings of an old abbey that might thwart her and Henry's happily ever after? Or did the Thorpes already plan for her disappointment?

Northanger Abbey in my mind is unfairly the most maligned of Austen's novels. The reason is because it's not what people expect. It's not like her other books and I think that is precisely the reason it holds such a special place in my heart. Admittedly the first time I read it I was thrown, because being released after her death you think it will adhere more to her later works, whereas in truth because of when it was written it's more a transitional novel bridging the style of her juvenilia and her later work. Therefore it's only on subsequent re-reads that you can fully appreciate Northanger Abbey for what it is. This book is unbalanced, it's not perfect, but it so clearly shows what Austen will be capable of with her wry observational style in the first section of the book. Which is why so many people say the book gives them such hope only to fall apart. While the second half is weaker, it shows that she is capable of seeing her concept through to the end. Because Northanger Abbey was written as a parody of Gothic literature, so therefore she had to take it to it's logical conclusion of Catherine thinking laundry lists are secrets of the dead. As a parody it is a wonderful send-up of the popular literature of the time, but as proto-Austen the first half is a glimpse into the writer she will become. That this is what she will be known for. For her humor, for what she will become, for the feelings, all the feelings I have each time I re-read this book it is easily in my top three of Austen's six novels.

As for those feels? Oh. My. God. It's not like this is the first or second time I've read this book but once again I am sucked in and it's like I'm reading it for the first time. I know what happens and yet my anxiety was at such a level you can not imagine it. I was seriously convinced that Catherine wasn't going to get her "happily ever after" that has been happening now for TWO HUNDRED YEARS! Seriously, two hundred years and I felt like it was happening for the first time. My main source of anxiety isn't that her and Henry get together, it's that they get the chance to get together despite everything those detestable Thorpes throw in their way. Oh, how I hate those Thorpes. Yes, John Thorpe is horrid with all his monetary delusions with regard to the Morlands, and with his assumptions. Also, let's take a moment here to point out how little men have changed in two hundred years. The way he's talking about his horses, it's like listening to a guy at a bar five minutes ago detailing everything there is to know about his car that you never cared to know! But I forgive John, to an extent, because there is no doubt in my mind that everything he believes and does is controlled by his puppet master and sister, Isabella. Such a faux friend! She only befriends Catherine to get to closer to her brother James, and when that falls apart, gaw, she's just scheming and double crossing, and just a lying little bitch. She deserves all the ill that befalls her. In fact, I think she might just be my most hated character in all of Austen... huh, that's a revelation that Caroline Bingley isn't going to like.

But going into Catherine's mind and how she sees Isabella? That is truly painful. Because the truth is Catherine is a heroine more in the Disney sense, she's all goodness and light and can't imagine anyone being mean or duplicitous because she's never come across this before. Of course her eyes will be opened by the end of the book but what I find fascinating is that because she is so genuine if someone isn't the only conclusion she can reach is one straight off the pages of the Gothic novels she loves so much. The second half of Northanger Abbey deals with Catherine thinking that Henry's father killed his wife because Catherine doesn't have any foreknowledge about people who say one thing while meaning another. She gives General Tilney these dubious motives because its the only way she can understand how he makes her feel. General Tilney is all polite obsequiousness to Catherine, assuming she is a rich heiress due to the Allens. Yet while everything is so nice that comes out of his mouth she can't ignore that she doesn't like him. She has every reason to like him, logically, but she picks up on the fact that Henry and Eleanor are never happy around him and therefore he must be a murderer. She is naive but sweetly so, so you can see why Henry can forgive her for making someone who is two faced into a man capable of the worst horrors... but of course, he has nothing on the duplicity of Isabella! Scheming, money grubbing, false friend!

Thankfully Henry can forgive Catherine's overactive imagination. Because the truth is this, Henry Tilney is the perfect Austen man. Darcy, a bit haughty, Bingley, a bit naive, Brandon, a bit dour, Edward, a bit too secretive, Knightly, a bit too much of a pedo, Wentworth, a bit too stalwart, and Edmund, a bit too relative... whereas Henry? Henry in my humble opinion is the perfect man. Seriously, this isn't up for discussion. Just take this as fact. He is perfect. Perhaps it's because he's the most fleshed out of Austen's heroes, but there's just something about him that makes me think, yeah, he's the one for me. One reason is his sense of humor. Can you imagine say Darcy, Brandon, and Wentworth in a room together? Not a smile among them. Whereas Henry is self-deprecating, willing to see the humor in tense situations, and seriously, think about it, who wants to marry someone who they can't have a good laugh with. Though the part that truly melts my heart is when he tells Catherine that of course he reads! Due to that odious John Thorpe Catherine has come to the wrong conclusion that not only do men not read but that reading is silly. I'm sorry, but reading is not just the best way to live a richer life full of adventure, but it's been proven that it makes people more empathetic because they can put themselves in other people's shoes. The fact that Henry proudly proclaims that he's a reader? Melting again. Not just that, he's read all the books Catherine loves and is a huge Mrs. Radcliffe fan. Be still my heart... or the lumpy wet mass it now is since it melted.

Though the sad truth is I don't think everyone has fully embraced Henry or Catherine... because as I said before, this is the troublesome book among Austen fans. I think the real reason is actually the parody of the Gothic. When Austen first wrote Northanger Abbey Gothic novels were all the rage. In fact, with age bracket and the rabidness of the following, the Twilight franchise is comparable. So Gothic novels were the Twilight of the early 1800s. Now here comes a girl who's never written a book before and she decides to parody the books she loves and also loves to mock. While Gothic literature comes and goes, having a resurgence every now and then, there's never been that stranglehold on the public imagination that it had during Austen's life, especially with the works of Mrs. Radcliffe. So modern readers aren't tuned into what the book is parodying. I remember reading Vanity Fair years ago, which is a bit of a slog, because there are so many topical jokes. I distinctly remember getting one of the jokes, which was in reference to She Stoops to Conquer and I thought, think how much I'm not getting. This book might be uproarious to someone of the time or a historian of the time... Therefore the first time I read Northanger Abbey I, like most everyone else, just didn't get it. It's just a sub par Austen I incorrectly thought. Thankfully, unlike most, I wasn't going to swear off the book. When I read it a second time knowing more I realized I was a fool the first time. The way Austen even parodies the origin stories of heroines is spot on. Plus, it's totally meta! So in other words, read something Gothic then come back and read how Austen tells her version... it's a little snarky, but in my mind nearly perfect.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 2 comments  

Labels: Bath, Bicentenary Ball, Catherine Morland, Going Gothic, Gothic Literature, Henry Tilney, Heroes, Heroine, Jane Austen, Meta, Mrs. Radcliffe, Northanger Abbey, She Stoops to Conquer, The Twilight Saga, Vanity Fair

Emma by Jane Austen
Published by: Max Press
Publication Date: 1815
Format: Hardcover, 240 Pages
Rating: ★★★★★
To Buy (different edition than one reviewed)

Emma Woodhouse is the center of her world. Looked upon by all in her small community as the perfect woman, the doting daughter, the ideal future wife. Yet little do they realize that she is the spider at the center of a web thinking everyone is there for her amusement. They are mere playthings to her and she has just lost her most favorite toy. Her governess Miss Taylor has married and become Mrs. Weston, thus constricting Emma's household to just her and her father and the occasional visits from Mr. Knightly. Therefore, despite Mr. Knightly's stern warnings, Emma finds herself a new favorite to play matchmaker with. Harriet Smith is a nobody, her parents having given her away. Emma has fanciful notions of whom Harriet's parents could be and therefore eschews Harriet marrying the kind farmer Robert Martin and sets Harriet on the path to conjugal bliss with the vicar Mr. Elton. But Mr. Elton is a social climber and fancies that he is worthy of Emma's hand. Once aware of her mistake you'd think that Emma would have taken the hint and stopped her matchmaking, but she soldiers on. Mr. Weston's son, Frank Churchill soon arrives on the scene to pay his respects to his new mother, and while first marked out for Emma, Emma soon thinks that happy is the man who changes Emma for Harriet. In all her ploys Emma never really sees that she is being callous and her jokes are at the expense of others, such as the poor Miss Bates and her niece Jane Fairfax, and have real world consequences. She lives in a bubble that desperately needs to be burst, and no matter how hard Mr. Knightly tries he can't seem to get through to Emma. In fact it's her favorite new toy, Harriet, who wields the needle and pops the bubble, opening Emma's eyes while also taking the shine off herself. Will Emma be able to fix what her childish games have wrought? Or will she lose her happily ever after?

Of all Austen's books Emma was the one I was most worried about rereading. Emma is actually the Austen book I have reread most recently before this year and it was because of that experience I was leery. It was during that February that Emma and I developed a loathing for each other. I'm sure it was mutual. She lumped me in with the Misses Bateses of the world and I thought she was a spoiled brat who needed to be taught a lesson. We parted. Not amicably. Yet here I am daring to reread her adventures in manipulating her small group of "friends." I have decided to refrain from passing judgment on her and she isn't allowed to comment on me. I think it's led to a far more pleasurable experience for us both. Though there are things I can't help but question on every reading of this book... mainly the Mr. Knightly/Emma age gap. I totally agree with Andrew Davies that having a man sixteen years older than you saying he first loved you when you were thirteen is more than a little icky. If Mr. Knightly had just refrained from saying that and a few other lines he wouldn't have come across as the Humbert Humbert of his day. Because really, when you think of it, a sixteen year age difference isn't that creepy. In fact there's far more than sixteen years between Marianne Dashwood and Colonel Brandon, and there's eighteen between me and Colin Firth, not that I've counted that often... But what I found interesting this time is that this creep factor wasn't so much there for me anymore. Perhaps it's because I have found far bigger creeps in this book, I'm sorry Frank Churchill, you're an irredeemable psychopath. Or perhaps it's because I see why Emma falls for Mr. Knightly. It's not his superiority above all others, it's the fact that Emma has Daddy issues. Serious Daddy issues. Issues that lead her to basically marry her "other" father. Are we to blame Mr. Knightly for taking advantage of the situation and forming Emma into the perfect woman? Or should we just say Emma needs therapy? My vote is for therapy.

As to why Emma so desperately needs therapy lets look to her treatment of Harriet. Now I'm not talking about controlling Harriet's expectations and romantic inclinations, which just shows that Emma is a bully, it's how she drops her like a hot potato as soon as Mr. Knightly comes between them. She's all for raising Harriet up and helping her find a better place in the world until Harriet targets that which Emma wants and then she literally can not get rid of Harriet fast enough sending her off to London. While distancing herself from this tangled situation might be expected, her throwing shade on Harriet isn't. All the previous objections as to "playing" with Harriet from Mr. Knightly are instantly seen. Emma raising Harriet above her station is odious. Harriet must remain in the muck where she belongs! Harriet is the lowest of the low. Woe betide anyone who ever liked or respected Harriet. She is now unclean and must away to her farmer never to be seen again. EXCUSE ME!?! This was Emma's protege, her best friend, her favorite toy, and she would destroy her like this? At least Mr. Knightly got Harriet back on track with her farmer, but Emma would have been happy if it had all disappeared. What confuses me most though is what is Austen saying about class in this instance? Time and time again her books have shown the plucky yet poor heroine rise above her station to find true love. Yet here she seems to be saying that love must be found within your station. Or at least if you're Harriet. Harriet seems to be a weird case removed from all that is Austen. Is it because of her unknown parentage? Because to an outsider Jane Fairfax is in much the same situation but somehow because of "old family ties" she's exempt and allowed to rise up. So the point of the book was to teach Emma what? That people have their place and she should grow up and follow the rules of the world around her? That everything is fine now that Harriet is back in her place, luckily with her own happily ever after? It seems antithesis to all Austen that came before or after. Where's the humor?

Because with Northanger Abbey we can clearly see that Austen wasn't one to pass up a good joke or a chance to parody. We see this again in Emma, though not quite so obviously. Literature is rife with orphans. It seems that you literally can't be a hero or heroine without losing one or both of your parents. Dickens would heartily embrace this at the end of the century in the most dramatic ways possible. In fact it's become such a trope that even Disney does it. And who, when a child, didn't daydream that they were off on an adventure and not a thought was given to the idea of parents living or dead? Yet Austen wanted to mess with this a little, just as she messed with the heroine archetype. It really wasn't until Thackeray and Vanity Fair thirty-three years later that we had a novel purposefully written sans heroine, but with Emma Woodhouse Austen came close. To muddy the heroine waters Emma isn't the only orphan, having lost her mother and then having lost Miss Taylor to marriage. In fact Emma, Harriet, Jane, AND Frank are all orphans. Jane and Harriet are in fact far closer to traditional Austen heroines than Emma herself is. It's like Austen wanted to take things to the farthest extreme possible. I mean yes, looking back now at the life expectancy and health care then available it's not surprising that many people were without a parent, but to have four main characters in one small town all deprived of one or both parental units? Austen is taking the piss and enjoying every second of it. What's more it's able to show how the loss of a parents affects one based on wealth and sex. Frank fares the best, being a man, he could have made his fortune, but instead a fortune just lands in his lap from relatives. Emma is also fine, being a woman of independent means. Harriet has a decent allowance, but her unknown parentage is a blight, one that can not be overcome, which a man in a similar situation might succeed in doing. Yet it's Jane who fares the worst. With no money she can't even rely on the love of those who raised her, she must seek her way in the world on her own, like a true Austen heroine.

Yet Jane is of course rescued by a proposal of marriage. In fact the most important event in Austen's novels is the conclusion when everyone gets perfect happiness, a phrase used too many times in Emma, when the marriage bans are read. Though Austen is odd in that for some reason she never fully writes the proposals which seal the end of our heroine's character arc. She might have a line of dialogue, but usually it's just that everything was settled when and how one would expect. There is no detail, no ardent declarations. The actual event is left to our own imaginations, and yet Austen does show proposals to two heroines. Proposals that are to be rejected. In fact, it feels like Austen doesn't feel herself up to writing earnest proposals but is fully willing to embrace writing comedic ones. No one can deny her wit is sharp as a razor. We of course must forget about Mr. Darcy's first attempt at securing Elizabeth's hand and instead focus on Mr. Collins and Mr. Elton, oddly both men of the cloth. Their proposals and the ensuing rejections are hilarious and easily a highlight of their respective stories. Mr. Collins is unwilling to believe that anyone would reject him and thinks it all a ploy, ah poor delusional man. Whereas Mr. Elton? Mr. Elton is drunk as a skunk and just goes for broke. His proposal to Emma is the culmination of the first part of the book where the slate is then wiped clean in anticipation of the arrival of Frank Churchill. Mr. Elton must exit stage left but he must do so in a glorious flame of mortification. Not to muddy the waters too much with bringing in adaptations, but Alan Cumming in the carriage on Christmas Eve throwing himself at Gwyneth Paltrow? That is movie perfection and possible only because of Austen's perfection. Then again, I do love me some Alan Cumming in basically anything. Or nothing, given his tendency to, you know...

Though this reading was more about serendipity than anything else. Yes, sometimes serendipity plays a part in reading a book. It might be the confluence of a TV show you're watching or a song you hear on the radio while also reading a book that makes things clearer, makes you see a connection, makes both better. They elevate each other. This happened to me because of rereading Emma at the same time as Twin Peaks returned to the small screen. I have had a love of Twin Peaks since my parents amazingly let me watch it at the age of eleven. I have gone back to the show again and again over the years, much as I have the works of Austen, and yet I never once thought of connecting the two until now. There is little doubt in my mind that David Lynch is a fan of Austen. Comparing them side by side it's obvious. There's a universal humanity to the way they both approach characters. They set their stories in small contained environments that have their own set of rules. They revel in the absurd. I can easily see Mr. Collins as an inhabitant of Lynch's universe, but more than anyone else, Miss Bates belongs in Twin Peaks. Miss Bates might be the most laughed at or pitied character in Emma with her pages of unbroken rambling dialogue but in her I see the underpinnings of the denizens of Twin Peaks. In Lynch's world characters are strange, they ramble on, they annoy you, you laugh at them, but in the end, you come to pity, and eventually to love them. You can especially see this in the arc of the Log Lady, who was always an odd outsider yet whose brief appearance in the new series prior to her death gave her a poignancy, much as Miss Bates does in Emma. What this revelation does to me is it shows me not just the staying power of Austen but why I have kept going back to Twin Peaks over the years. Lynch tapped into the universal human experience in the same way Austen did over two hundred years earlier. Makes you wonder if Twin Peaks will still be be discussed a couple hundred years from now...

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Alan Cumming, Bicentenary Ball, Class, Colin Firth, David Lynch, Emma, Emma Woodhouse, Frank Churchill, Jane Austen, Lolita, Marriage, Miss Bates, Mr. Elton, Mr. Knightly, Orphan, Thackeray, Twin Peaks, Vanity Fair

Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen
Published by: Little Books Ltd
Publication Date: 1817
Format: Hardcover, 240 Pages
Rating: ★★★★★
To Buy (different edition than one reviewed)

Catherine Morland isn't like the Gothic heroines she loves to read about; her name is prosaic, she's a content and happy girl who could never think badly of anyone and is surrounded by a big family who love her. But more importantly, alas, she's never even been to a crumbling castle or monastery let alone to the South of France where she could be held hostage. Her first real adventure is when her kindly and wealthy neighbors, the Allens, invite Catherine to accompany them to Bath. Mrs. Allen views Bath in the first few days of their residence as rather boring as they have no acquaintances, but that is soon about to change. Catherine's first acquaintance is a Mr. Henry Tilney, a lovely young man who dances with her and disappears. Her second acquaintance appears as if she'll be around longer. Isabella Thorpe is the daughter of an old classmate of Mrs. Allen and they soon become fast friends. It transpires that Isabella's brother John is friends with Catherine's brother James, and soon Isabella is confiding her feelings for James to Catherine all while trying to get Catherine and John together. But despite just one night Catherine's heart already belongs to Henry Tilney. Luckily for her he soon returns to Bath, bringing along his sister Eleanor and his rather forbidding father. As is often the case with young girls battle lines are drawn, Isabella wants Catherine to be hers alone now that she has become engaged to James, yet Catherine is defiant and sticks to the Tilneys. In fact Catherine shortly leaves Bath with the Tilneys for their ancestral home, Northanger Abbey. All the complications of Bath are behind Catherine, but will she create her own obstacles in the Gothic surroundings of an old abbey that might thwart her and Henry's happily ever after? Or did the Thorpes already plan for her disappointment?

Northanger Abbey in my mind is unfairly the most maligned of Austen's novels. The reason is because it's not what people expect. It's not like her other books and I think that is precisely the reason it holds such a special place in my heart. Admittedly the first time I read it I was thrown, because being released after her death you think it will adhere more to her later works, whereas in truth because of when it was written it's more a transitional novel bridging the style of her juvenilia and her later work. Therefore it's only on subsequent re-reads that you can fully appreciate Northanger Abbey for what it is. This book is unbalanced, it's not perfect, but it so clearly shows what Austen will be capable of with her wry observational style in the first section of the book. Which is why so many people say the book gives them such hope only to fall apart. While the second half is weaker, it shows that she is capable of seeing her concept through to the end. Because Northanger Abbey was written as a parody of Gothic literature, so therefore she had to take it to it's logical conclusion of Catherine thinking laundry lists are secrets of the dead. As a parody it is a wonderful send-up of the popular literature of the time, but as proto-Austen the first half is a glimpse into the writer she will become. That this is what she will be known for. For her humor, for what she will become, for the feelings, all the feelings I have each time I re-read this book it is easily in my top three of Austen's six novels.

As for those feels? Oh. My. God. It's not like this is the first or second time I've read this book but once again I am sucked in and it's like I'm reading it for the first time. I know what happens and yet my anxiety was at such a level you can not imagine it. I was seriously convinced that Catherine wasn't going to get her "happily ever after" that has been happening now for TWO HUNDRED YEARS! Seriously, two hundred years and I felt like it was happening for the first time. My main source of anxiety isn't that her and Henry get together, it's that they get the chance to get together despite everything those detestable Thorpes throw in their way. Oh, how I hate those Thorpes. Yes, John Thorpe is horrid with all his monetary delusions with regard to the Morlands, and with his assumptions. Also, let's take a moment here to point out how little men have changed in two hundred years. The way he's talking about his horses, it's like listening to a guy at a bar five minutes ago detailing everything there is to know about his car that you never cared to know! But I forgive John, to an extent, because there is no doubt in my mind that everything he believes and does is controlled by his puppet master and sister, Isabella. Such a faux friend! She only befriends Catherine to get to closer to her brother James, and when that falls apart, gaw, she's just scheming and double crossing, and just a lying little bitch. She deserves all the ill that befalls her. In fact, I think she might just be my most hated character in all of Austen... huh, that's a revelation that Caroline Bingley isn't going to like.

But going into Catherine's mind and how she sees Isabella? That is truly painful. Because the truth is Catherine is a heroine more in the Disney sense, she's all goodness and light and can't imagine anyone being mean or duplicitous because she's never come across this before. Of course her eyes will be opened by the end of the book but what I find fascinating is that because she is so genuine if someone isn't the only conclusion she can reach is one straight off the pages of the Gothic novels she loves so much. The second half of Northanger Abbey deals with Catherine thinking that Henry's father killed his wife because Catherine doesn't have any foreknowledge about people who say one thing while meaning another. She gives General Tilney these dubious motives because its the only way she can understand how he makes her feel. General Tilney is all polite obsequiousness to Catherine, assuming she is a rich heiress due to the Allens. Yet while everything is so nice that comes out of his mouth she can't ignore that she doesn't like him. She has every reason to like him, logically, but she picks up on the fact that Henry and Eleanor are never happy around him and therefore he must be a murderer. She is naive but sweetly so, so you can see why Henry can forgive her for making someone who is two faced into a man capable of the worst horrors... but of course, he has nothing on the duplicity of Isabella! Scheming, money grubbing, false friend!

Thankfully Henry can forgive Catherine's overactive imagination. Because the truth is this, Henry Tilney is the perfect Austen man. Darcy, a bit haughty, Bingley, a bit naive, Brandon, a bit dour, Edward, a bit too secretive, Knightly, a bit too much of a pedo, Wentworth, a bit too stalwart, and Edmund, a bit too relative... whereas Henry? Henry in my humble opinion is the perfect man. Seriously, this isn't up for discussion. Just take this as fact. He is perfect. Perhaps it's because he's the most fleshed out of Austen's heroes, but there's just something about him that makes me think, yeah, he's the one for me. One reason is his sense of humor. Can you imagine say Darcy, Brandon, and Wentworth in a room together? Not a smile among them. Whereas Henry is self-deprecating, willing to see the humor in tense situations, and seriously, think about it, who wants to marry someone who they can't have a good laugh with. Though the part that truly melts my heart is when he tells Catherine that of course he reads! Due to that odious John Thorpe Catherine has come to the wrong conclusion that not only do men not read but that reading is silly. I'm sorry, but reading is not just the best way to live a richer life full of adventure, but it's been proven that it makes people more empathetic because they can put themselves in other people's shoes. The fact that Henry proudly proclaims that he's a reader? Melting again. Not just that, he's read all the books Catherine loves and is a huge Mrs. Radcliffe fan. Be still my heart... or the lumpy wet mass it now is since it melted.

Though the sad truth is I don't think everyone has fully embraced Henry or Catherine... because as I said before, this is the troublesome book among Austen fans. I think the real reason is actually the parody of the Gothic. When Austen first wrote Northanger Abbey Gothic novels were all the rage. In fact, with age bracket and the rabidness of the following, the Twilight franchise is comparable. So Gothic novels were the Twilight of the early 1800s. Now here comes a girl who's never written a book before and she decides to parody the books she loves and also loves to mock. While Gothic literature comes and goes, having a resurgence every now and then, there's never been that stranglehold on the public imagination that it had during Austen's life, especially with the works of Mrs. Radcliffe. So modern readers aren't tuned into what the book is parodying. I remember reading Vanity Fair years ago, which is a bit of a slog, because there are so many topical jokes. I distinctly remember getting one of the jokes, which was in reference to She Stoops to Conquer and I thought, think how much I'm not getting. This book might be uproarious to someone of the time or a historian of the time... Therefore the first time I read Northanger Abbey I, like most everyone else, just didn't get it. It's just a sub par Austen I incorrectly thought. Thankfully, unlike most, I wasn't going to swear off the book. When I read it a second time knowing more I realized I was a fool the first time. The way Austen even parodies the origin stories of heroines is spot on. Plus, it's totally meta! So in other words, read something Gothic then come back and read how Austen tells her version... it's a little snarky, but in my mind nearly perfect.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Bath, Catherine Morland, Going Gothic, Gothic Literature, Henry Tilney, Heroes, Heroine, Jane Austen, Meta, Mrs. Radcliffe, Northanger Abbey, She Stoops to Conquer, The Twilight Saga, Vanity Fair

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
Published by: Knopf
Publication Date: September 9th, 2014
Format: Hardcover, 336 Pages
Rating: ★★★
To Buy

The famous actor Arthur Leander died on the last night of the old world. He wasn't one to suffer like those in the ER on that snowy night in Toronto hailing the arrival of the Georgian Flu which would kill all but one in two hundred people. Arthur had a fatal heart attack onstage during his star performance in King Lear. He'd never know of the horrors that came after or of how he was a tenuous link between some of the survivors. He was blissfully ignorant of what was to come. Twenty years later Kirsten Raymonde is touring around what used to be Michigan with the Traveling Symphony. When she was a young girl she was in a production of King Lear with the great Arthur Leander. Now she is in a troupe that specializes in bringing Shakespeare to the various outposts of remaining civilization. The troupe tried other playwrights, but people seem to want what was best of the old world, and Shakespeare and classical music remind them of that. While Kirsten herself was too young to remember what was lost from the world before or even the first year after the collapse, she scours abandoned houses for mentions of the great actor who was kind to her and who gave her her most prized possessions, two issues of the comic Station Eleven.

To understand how lives have played out in this new world, we must go back to the previous world. The world where Arthur's first wife was working on a comic, a world where his second wife was conspiciously present at a vapid dinner party celebrating Arthur's wedding anniversary to his first wife. The birth of Arthur's son while Arthur was already moving on to wife number three. Arthur's oldest friend betraying him while his dearest friend Clark will live long past Arthur's death. Each and every step and decision plays a role in a world that Arthur could never imagine and which he will never live to see. A world where an airport is a sanctuary, where survival is insufficient, and where Shakespeare brings people hope. A world that is at one and the same time embracing the past while trying to forge a future. A world that is dangerous to live in. A world where a prophet could spell destruction and ruin for people who only wish to live as they choose. Every moment could be these people's last, yet their survived the end of the world so they must try to rebuild it. To move forward, no matter the cost.

The irony isn't lost on me that a book that touts the credo from Star Trek that "survival is insufficient" is literally only about survival, and I really hope it wasn't lost on the author. There are many ways in which Station Eleven differs from your typical post-apocalyptic story, but the lofty ideals of the book might be the biggest difference. It wants so much to be different, to show that art is needed for sanity and survival, yet in the end all the Traveling Symphony's journey boils down to is surviving to the next day, the next outpost of civilization. If it wasn't for this dichotomy between the book's ideals and what the book actually represents I think it would have worked better. Station Eleven is an intriguing mood piece that embraces different ways of storytelling, from lists to dialogue to interviews, slipping through time and the character's timelines to create a vibrant world which in no way embraces the ideals of that Star Trek quote. It just feels so shoehorned in. Like Emily St. John Mandel heard that line of dialogue and jumped off from there, forgetting that the story and this motto should actually connect. And it's not that I don't fully embrace the idea that we need more to survive, it's just that Station Eleven, boiled down to it's essence, is only about surviving, nothing more. The book might have lofty ideals, but in the end it's a post-apocalyptic story, and those are all about survival.

Aside from this quibble I liked that the narrative wasn't your typical post-apocalyptic story. Post-apocalyptic stories tend to fall into two categories, one is that the apocalypse has just happened and our hero or heroine has to survive the initial destruction of the world to help rebuild it in some nebulous future. The second is that the apocalypse happened generations ago and our hero or heroine is living under a not ideal future regime, in other words, think The Hunger Games. Here we see the initial outbreak, but then we flash forward. Not to some "Hunger Games" world but to a more pioneer world, where the old world isn't long gone, but the new world hasn't fully been formed yet. It's not just about getting from day to day, but also trying to come to terms with the life they now have while still clinging to memories of the past. This, coupled with the flashbacks to the world before the flu, makes this a more intimate and personal story. It's not so much what happened to the world but what happened to these people. What happened to these characters who were connected to Arthur and how they survived in this new world. I can't help thinking about when asked what she most missed of the old world Kirsten won't answer, because it's too personal, and that, right there is why this book works. It's about these people.

Yet by spending so much time with these people and with their pasts we don't get any sense of what the future holds. Perhaps we could say that "survival is insufficient" should be the outlook going forward. All we see is them coping, surviving day to day, year to year, without any real forward momentum. The Traveling Symphony and how they are continually stuck touring one route, year in, year out, kind of symbolizes humanity at it's current stage. They have found a comfortable routine and now don't deviate from it. Yes, their might be risk venturing off the accustomed path, but humanity is stagnating. They aren't trying to fix the world, they're just living in it. My mind kept getting stuck on questions like why don't people try to do this that or the other. Why can't they have electricity? Get some smart people together, congregate in a large community, and FIGURE IT OUT! Twenty years and they have grown lazy. Sure, the author tries to romanticize the situation a bit with the Traveling Symphony harking back to days gone by when troupes traveled the countryside bringing culture to the masses and how Shakespeare himself lived in a plague ridden time. Yes, these are interesting comparisons, but also remember people in Shakespeare's time were trying to better themselves, to move forward, not live in the past and not move on. The only flicker of hope happens in the last few pages; while personally I could have done with the hope a little earlier.

And, of course, because this is a post-apocalyptic story the Big Bad has to be a Prophet who has multiple wives and runs off anyone who doesn't play by his rules. This is Stephen King 101 people. Think of The Stand. This Prophet is the main reason this book is problematic to me. Yes, I can look beyond the lack of hope, I can look beyond the disconnect between the message and what really happens, but I can't look beyond cliched characters that bog down the narrative. This character should have been spooky, terrifying, someone to run from. Instead he's meh. It's not just that his beliefs are bog standard for any post-apocalyptic Prophet, it's that he's predictable. The least you can do with going with a cliche is embrace it. Go all out! Make him over the top, someone so big for their britches that the megalomania carries the character on a wave of crazy through his predictability. Instead I just hoped for him to have as little time on the page as possible. As for his back story... well, if you didn't figure out who he was about two seconds into his first mysterious reveal, aka what he named his dog, there might not be any hope for you. Now I'm not going to spoil this reveal for you, because that is truly cruel, but the predictability of who he is and how he got this way, well, it quite literally smacked this book down a few stars. In fact it made the whole back end of the book slide from a pretty original story into predictable meh.

But in the end what did I expect from a story where the lynchpin is a dislikable actor? Yes, we could go on one of those endless debates about how there are antiheroes and antiheroines, and that characters don't need to be likable, yeah yeah, the Vanity Fair of it all; but I'll always come to the same conclusion, sure, they don't need to be likable, but they at least have to be fascinating. For some people, aka, the people who love to watch Entertainment Tonight and read People and think TMZ is the best news out there might take glee in having an actor, even a fictitious one, be the lynchpin to a story. Because they like celebrity gossip and dishing dirt. But for me celebrity in and of itself doesn't make a character interesting. In fact all Arthur's cheating and his storytelling about his home island made me just want to smack him for his pretensions. The more I learned about him the more I disliked him. I honestly can not see the draw to him. Telling us over and over what a great actor he is doesn't make it so. Making him your lynchpin in a story without fully investing the time to make him fascinating makes your narrative weak. Station Eleven started out so strong, with memorable visuals and interesting developments, like the comic book, but it kept falling off in quality till it ended with a whimper. Much like what the dog Luli would do if reprimanded.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Apocalypse, Backlog Bonanza, Big Bad, Celebrities, Comics, Emily St. John Mandel, King Lear, Post-Apocalyptic, Prophet, Shakespeare, Star Trek, Station Eleven, Stephen King, The Hunger Games, The Stand, Vanity Fair

Heather Rose Jones is an interesting mix of modern and historical. Be it biotech or linguistics, she seems perfectly suited for whatever time period she lands in if a time machine were to show up on her doorstep and take her on a journey. Her early life was far flung, from the various corners of the continental United States to several European countries, though she currently calls the Bay Area home. Growing up in an academic family surly spurred her passions for research and teaching. She loves "to share my knowledge with anyone who will stand still long enough to listen." Though who knows how long that would be given her fascinating and diverse interests! Heather has a BS in zoology, after which she spent a decade in medical research, only to go back to school for a PhD in Linguistics from U.C. Berkley where she specialized in the semantics of Medieval Welsh prepositions. While she might have come to my attention due to her fiction writing, I'm amazed at the sheer scope and dedication to all her various interests.

Her "Skin Singer" series of short stories have appeared in Marion Zimmer Bradley's Sword and Sorceress anthologies, but you can surly guess by now that she wouldn't limit her prodigious talents and interests to just one writing outlet. Heather has written for many non-fiction publications as well on topics ranging from biotech to historic costume to naming practices. As for her Alpennia books, think of them as historical fantasy with a detailed belief system with lesbians. In fact her passion project is the Lesbian Historic Motif Project she began to change the unexamined assumptions about the place and nature of lesbian-like characters in historic fact, literature, art and imaginations. She is also a total geek for historic textiles and clothing, making little doll reproductions of archaeological clothing finds. Is it any wonder with these passions coupled with geeking out over linguistics, historic cooking, and much more that she is a member of the Society for Creative Anachronism? There she's known by a far more Welsh handle than Heather, she's Tangwystyl verch Morgant Glasvryn. I should just let Heather, or should I say Mistress Tangwystyl verch Morgant Glasvryn, take the wheel.

Question: When did you first discover Jane Austen?

Answer: I have a sheepish confession that I read her books well after I’d fallen in love with a number of movie treatments and with the Regency romance genre in general. I was certainly aware that she was the ur-text on which the genre was based. And it isn’t as if I had any aversion to reading novels of the era. (I read Thackeray’s Vanity Fair just for fun back in 1975, after all.) I’m still working on getting a complete collection of the works of Georgette Heyer.

But at some point about 15 years ago I realized I’d never actually read Austen herself, so I marched off to the bookstore and picked up a complete set and read them all straight through. I certainly have my favorites and my less preferred works. (I seem to be alone among my friends in liking Emma, but every time I re-read Mansfield Park, I want to throw it across the room.) I also have audio versions of my favorites in heavy rotation on my anti-insomnia program. (My favorites are the free recordings at Librivox.org, and my favorite narrator is Karen Savage.)

Question: What do you think Jane Austen would think of her impact with so many literary offshoots, from parody to pastiche?

Answer: I tend to be wary of trying to second-guess authors’ attitudes. Even the authors I know personally can surprise me in their take on questions like this. Given the circumstances of her life, I can guess that one of her reactions might be, “Gee, I wish I could have gotten a cut of the take!” I suspect she might be astonished that her work is remembered at all two centuries later. But I refuse to guess at what she might think of all the people re-purposing her stories in the vastly different ways we’ve seen. People have very individual and emotional reactions to that sort of thing, and all of them are valid.

Question: Where do you get your inspiration from?

Answer: My stories are, at heart, the stories I wish other people had written so that I’d have been able to read them at important points in my life. So I’m inspired by the echoing gaps in my literary life that are begging to be filled. I’ve spent most of my life searching through bookstore and library shelves for books that recognize and respect core aspects of my identity: being a woman, being a geek, being a lesbian, being an intellectual. One gets very tired of being told implicitly that one doesn’t exist, or at least, that one isn’t worthy of being included in stories.

On a more practical basis, I’m inspired by the life-long love of European history that began when I spent a year in Prague at the age of ten. (My father was a university professor on sabbatical.) I love immersing myself in the everyday material culture of places, times, and peoples different from my own.

Question: What makes the early 19th century mesh so well with magic?

Answer: Is is heresy for me to say that I don’t think there’s anything special about the early 19th century that makes it suited to magic? Every age, every culture, and every literary genre inspires particular flavors and approaches to magic. I think that the existing popularity of the Regency setting (and of the Regency romance genre in general) made it inevitable that fantasy writers who loved that setting would look for types of magic that fit into it well.

I think some of the key characteristics of Regency magic have to do with the eras and movements it balances between. The Industrial Revolution creates some major challenges for designing a magical world. Do you view it as a threat to pre-industrial magic or as a context for a new industrial-based magic? The social and political shifts in Europe from the remnants of old-style monarchy to more populist governments similarly present a challenge to motifs of magic as an echo of aristocracy or as the basis for a “everyman makes good” plot. To the extent that magic is viewed as anti-rational, any 19th century understanding of magic needs to be in dialog with the 18th century Age of Enlightenment and its consequences for philosophy and religion.

Questions of this sort exist for any historic setting. A Renaissance magic setting will similarly be driven by and need to deal with the social and technological changes in which it operates. The entire genre of Urban Fantasy asks the question of what magic can look like in our current world. So to return to my original answer, I don’t think magic necessarily meshes better with a Regency setting in comparison to other eras. But the setting will certainly generate a particular flavor of magic unique to that era.

Question: The world building and system of magic varies greatly in the regency fantasy genre, how did you go about creating yours?

Answer: I had the setting before I decided/realized it was going to include magic. (The very first ideas for the Alpennia books were much more along the lines of an ordinary historical romantic adventure.) I wanted a form of magic in which it would make sense that the existence of magic hadn’t created massive divergences from our own timeline and historic development. So I looked to existing mystical themes in history and asked, “What if, sometimes, for some people, this actually worked the way that people at the time believed it worked?”

In Daughter of Mystery, the main magical focus is religious in nature. I started with the proposition: what if aspects of folk religion, and especially the folk-religious aspects of the cults of the saints in Catholicism, were a bit more...functional than they are in our world? What if some people could work “miracles” fairly reliably? But what if the nature of those miracles was such that it was impossible to turn them into a science? It was also important to me to treat the religious basis of the magic in a respectful way. As an atheist, it meant the world to me when various of my Catholic friends told me I’d “gotten it right.”

In the world of Alpennia, people have varying levels of ability of magical causation. Some have none; some have so little that you’d need a lot of people working in concert to make anything happen; and very rarely some people have enough ability to produce “miracles” on their own. But alongside this, I imagined that the ability to detect miracles was similarly distributed. Some people can’t see anything unless it has a direct visible manifestation--and most often that could be explained away as chance or coincidence. Some people can perceive the workings of magic itself in sensory form: visions of the forces at work, auditory or tactile sensations. Very rarely, someone has both the ability to work magic and to see the mechanisms by which it works well enough to develop their talents into a reliable practice. If they have the proper guidance. And if society thinks it’s appropriate for them to do so. And if the results of their efforts don’t cause them fatal problems.

Channeling the understanding and practice of magic through religious ritual both created a context for passing along “effective” practices, but also for diluting them into mere rote ceremony. So I had my context in which there was the possibility of a particular individual having and developing significant magical skills, but where that possibility didn’t translate into the development of a “technology of magic”.

In later books, we see that religion isn’t the only context in which the magic in my world manifests. The Mystic Marriage centers around alchemy--a field that my characters treat as if it were purely scientific, but where it’s clear to the readers that the same mystical forces that lie behind miracles are driving the results of alchemical experiments. In my current work in progress, Mother of Souls, we see mystical forces being channeled through other practices such as music and art. But in all cases, the effects can range from barely perceptible to world-shaking, depending on the practitioners and the practice.

Question: If you had to choose between writing only period literature or only fantasy literature, which would win?

Answer: I’ve always refused to accept false dichotomies. I’ve spent most of my writing life feeling like I had to choose between writing characters like me and writing characters that I could sell stories about. Or between writing the stories I wanted to read and writing the stories other people wanted to read. When I had the finished manuscript of Daughter of Mystery in hand, I had to make the very important choice of whether to try to publish it as a mainstream fantasy novel or as a lesbian novel. I refuse to be boxed. I’ve sold purely historic stories (“Where My Heart Goes”, a historical romance short story set in 16th century Italy). I’ve sold purely fantasy stories (the “Skinsinger” series in the Sword and Sorceress anthology series). And I’ve sold historic fantasy set in both the Regency and medieval periods. I will not erase any part of my writing self, not even just for fun in a quiz.

Question: Be honest, have you ever dressed up in Regency clothes just to pretend for a moment you are in the past?

Answer: I’ve been deeply involved in historic re-creation for the last 40 years. In terms of organized events, it’s been mostly in the Society for Creative Anachronism, but I’ve worn costumes from Bronze Age Denmark and pharaonic Egypt all the way up through the 1930s. I love participating in historic themed “set pieces”, especially dinners and similarly structured events. I’ve prepared historic meals scattered over several millennia. (You should see my historic culinary library!) At Worldcon last year, I brought some Alpennian pastries as refreshments for my author’s kaffee klatch, based on a French cookbook of the same era. But I confess, I haven’t yet made a specifically Regency-era outfit. I have the fabric sitting in my stash and I know exactly which dress from my books I want to make. It’s just a matter of time and of having the excuse of what to wear it for.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 2 comments  

Labels: Daughter of Mystery, Heather Rose Jones, Jane Austen, Lesbian Historic Motif Project, Linguistics, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Mystic Marriage, Prague, Regency Magic, SCA, Sword and Sorceress, Vanity Fair, Welsh

Courtship and Curses (Leland Sisters Book 3) by Marissa Doyle
Published by: Square Fish
Publication Date: August 7th, 2012
Format: Paperback, 368 Pages
Rating: ★★★★★
To Buy

Sophie spent years dreaming of what it would be like to have her first season in London. Needless to say her daydreams were nothing like the reality her life has become. When the illness came no one could have guessed the toll it would take on the Rosier family. Sophie lost her mother, her sister, and the assurance of two strong limbs holding her up. She is now crippled and must rely on a cane to support her. Therefore spending months in ballrooms unable to dance escorted by her aunts isn't exactly what she hoped for. That doesn't even take the rumors into account. The fact that the ton has somehow gotten it into it's collective consciousness that she is some kind of malformed freak that can't string two words together, let alone form a sentence, is galling. At least if they see her their misconceptions should be fixed, shouldn't they? But for all that Sophie has endured nothing has cut her to the quick more than the loss of her magic. The illness that ravaged her body also took away what was most precious and secret to her. What's worse is that she has no one to turn to. Her mother taught her in secret, and with her mother gone who can she trust?

Soon Sophie's lack of magic is a major worry. Her father, Lord Lansell, is almost the victim of a tragic accident. The almost had nothing to do with Sophie but with the dashing Lord Woodbridge. In fact Sophie only made matters worse. But soon another "accident" leads Sophie to a startling discovery, many members of the War Office have been "attacked" in these seemingly random ways. Could a French Spy be using magic in order to undermine the British war effort against Napoleon? If this is the case Sophie needs her magic back more then ever! But protecting her father isn't the only thing occupying her time. Lord Woodbridge won't leave her alone. Sure she could see herself prior to her deformity falling for such a man, but that was before. What could he see in her now? As for his cousin Parthenope and her parakeet Hester, they have quickly become Sophie's trusted allies. So why can she trust Parthenope but can't trust her feelings for Lord Woodbridge? It is all too confusing and she really needs her mother. But perhaps Sophie will realize that even with a cane she can stand on her own two feet and make a contribution to the world.

This is THE Regency Magic book you've been waiting for in Marissa Doyle's series. While the first two books were lovely, being set during the time of Victoria they weren't so much Regency and therefore had a different, if still magical, writing style. Courtship and Curses though is all Regency all the time! Tangentially relating to the previous Leland sisters book by following Pen and Persy's mother, Parthenope, and her first season, there's a moral formal, more Jane Austen air to the writing that some people might find too stylized but which I reveled in. There's just something magical about books set during the Regency, whether they contain magic or not. Personally I would never want to do "the season" and as for paying house calls everyday? Spare me now. It's a world that I wouldn't ever necessarily want to live in, yet somehow these books about bygone days of balls and manners just draw me in. Now I don't want you thinking I'm not a connoisseur of this style, because I am. It takes a special kind of author and story to whisk me away and Marissa Doyle did an admirable job of providing me with the cheapest kind of time travel around.

Being fully back in the Regency means that we get war and Wellington. I kid you not that Wellington is one of my favorite characters to be portrayed fictionally. He was such a symbol of the time and such a lightning rod for the war with France that I seriously just want him at every ball being boisterous and opinionated. Of course I always picture Wellington as Stephen Fry from Blackadder and that doesn't hurt. But Marissa Doyle doesn't just use Wellington as a signifier for the war with France or even for comedic purposes, she uses him to show the actual danger that the war represents and also as a sort of catalyst for Sophie to embrace herself and her magic. This entire volume actually serves to remind us of the dangers of life during wartime. In the previous volumes everything that occurred was building to one great and dangerous event that would change everything. Here there is constant peril for members of the War Office. Attack after attack after attack. It's not that it just ups the suspense, it's that you feel the danger more. This isn't your typical Jane Austen with balls and courting, with officers only entering to show off their lovely uniforms. I would say that Marissa Doyle captures more of what Thackeray did with Vanity Fair. The harsh reality versus the rose-tinted glasses.

One of the harsh realities of war is prejudice. Of course this is something our heroine Sophie has had to face with her deformity. But during a war prejudice is pretty much universally shifted to the country that you are fighting, in this instance France. There are two prominent French characters in Courtship and Curses, Madame Carswell, the widow of Lord Lansell's oldest and dearest friend, and a confidant to Sophie, and the Comte de Carmouche-Ponthieux, a lost love of Sophie's Aunt Molly. Madame Carswell more than the Comte is the subject of much gossip, not just because she's French, but because she's a threat to those older women who want to get their claws into Lord Lansell. Sophie is wonderful in that she stands by her friends. She has known the evil glares of others and tries to protect those who protect her. Yet what I find most interesting is that in one of these two instances her trust actually isn't justified. Prejudices form for a reason, no matter how stupid, and while we should always fight it, sometimes, just sometimes the reason for them rears it's ugly head. And I like that Marissa Doyle doesn't make it so clear cut, because that isn't the way of the world. Not everyone we prejudge is deserving of exoneration, just as we should try to be less prejudiced. Life is full of these contradictions and to have both innocence and guilt shown goes to the heart of life's messiness. Plus, manipulating our prejudices does keep a story going.

Yet the heart of this book is Sophie. What really struck me about this book is that Sophie is a very different type of heroine. With her deformity she has a very different vantage point from anyone else. It's not just that she's more passive in society being relegated to the sidelines of the ballrooms and therefore sees more, it's that the way people viewed deformities during this time was so different that it would be so easy to think badly of yourself. Because deformities were thought to outwardly show an inner malignancy. That obviously Sophie's foot was because she had something very wrong with her, not that she was the victim of a serious illness she couldn't control, despite being a witch. Now most authors would use this set up to give us a "teaching moment" on what it means to be broken and to willingly accept our limitations, or how to overcome this, but thankfully that isn't what Marissa Doyle does at all. Instead we are shown Sophie's very real struggle and her inner turmoil that asks how can we be strong when we think ourselves crippled in mind or in body? Because it isn't the affliction it's the attitude that is important. So while we are "taught" that a positive attitude can overcome anything, we aren't "taught" it with a stick.

This goes even deeper when you look at the "good" and the "bad" people that surround Sophie. Being brought out in society by her Aunts, Sophie's Aunt Isobel is always telling her how lucky she'll be to get a second son with no prospects because of what she is. It's never about WHO she is, but WHAT. I can't help thinking about the analogy of being overweight. I was told my entire life that I was overweight. Looking back at pictures when I was younger I wasn't overweight in the least, yet I believed it. I believed it so much that I developed the mindset that this was something that would never change and therefore what I ate and how I took care of myself didn't matter and I did become overweight as a result. But I don't think that way anymore, or at least I try not to, and it's because of my friends. It's about surrounding yourself with good people, people who see who you are. People who boost you up and not drag you down. That is what Madame Carswell, Parthenope, and Lord Woodbridge do for Sophie. They make her realize that she is special. That she isn't defined by some outward feature that people can point at and laugh. That is why her magic returns. That and a stern talking to by Wellington. Sophie's magic is basically her self-esteem. She learns to love herself and therefore she is powerful. Now that is something we all need to remember!

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Blackadder, Courtship and Curses, Deformity, France, Jane Austen, Leland Sisters, Magic, Marissa Doyle, Napoleon, Napoleonic War, Prejudice, Regency Magic, Self Esteem, Stephen Fry, Thackeray, Vanity Fair