Phew. I've finished Bring Up the Bodies, and I can certainly understand why Hilary Mantel, in the end, decided to break off after the Boleyn affair and save the rest of Cromwell's career for a later novel. You really do need some time to digest his behaviour before you're ready to engage in what happens next to Mantel's hard-hitting protagonist. But at least now we know the excuse he had for (on Henry's orders) sending six people to their death on trumped-up charges.
There isn't any.
It came as quite a shock to me. I was counting on understanding Cromwell's point of view better after reading this book. Instead, the opposite happened. Big baby Henry wants out of his marriage, Cromwell's there to help, and at the same time he wants to get his own back on a couple of courtiers who were mean to the dear departed Wolsey... Is this really it? That's not nearly good enough, and to make things worse, Cromwell allies himself with the Catholic groupings at court to achieve his aims. How clever is that? I can hear the thump of a Master Secretary being dropped by his new mates even now.
What disturbed me even more was my own squeamish reaction to Cromwell's dealings. I found the scenes where he uses mental torture to get a confession out of poor Mark Smeaton deeply unpleasant. Now why? I mean, these scenes are deeply unpleasant even objectively speaking, but I've admired villains who've been up to far worse things than scaring a dandyish lute-player out of his senses. Compared to, say, Scarpia in Tosca, Cromwell's a pussycat. But while I hardly spared a thought for Cavaradossi's cracking ribs on the rack, the stratagem of locking Mark in a room with a "ghost" really gets to me.
I think part of the answer lies in the fact that I've got difficulties with the "villain as hero" wheeze. From the top of my head, I can't think of a single instance where it has actually worked for me. It should be a dream come true, shouldn't it? And it feels desperately shallow only to fancy villains when you're not supposed to, letting your reaction be led by their function in their plot rather than by their wonderfully sinister personality. But somehow, the moment the villain moves to the centre of the plot and the events are filtered entirely through his consciousness, I feel myself backing away. That's why I was never a fan of the Francis Urquhart series, in spite of the late lamented Fouché-lookalike Ian Richardson in the main role. I can't quite explain it - perhaps the lack of a moralising hero or narrator somehow forces the reader, very unwillingly, to do his/her own moralising. You watch the villain behaving very badly indeed without any real sense of compunction, and you wonder: what, am I supposed to cheer? To find it funny? To think "Ha, serves the little squirt right"? But this isn't funny, this is wrong.
It's a sad thing daring to contemplate even for a moment that though villains are often clever, charming, entertaining, uncomfortable-truth-telling, undeniably hard-done by and a myriad of other things they are seldom right. And as long as we don't have full disclosure of their thoughts, we can fondly imagine that they are, somehow, aware of the fact themselves.
This could be the reason why I feel more comfortable with shifty Cromwell in Henry VIII or fanatical monk-bashing Cromwell in The Tudors than with Mantel's somewhat smug Cromwell who's in denial about having done anything villainous whatsoever. Still, he did make sure that Anne's "suitors" got killed cleanly with an axe instead of being hung, drawn and quartered, even commoner Mark, because "when he was under my roof I offered him mercy, and this is all the mercy I can deliver". What a nice man.
Wednesday, 19 September 2012
Wednesday, 5 September 2012
Bankable good reads
Oversized paperbacks, of the kind that's often published now instead of/at the same time as the hardback, are a bit useless. They are just as heavy and awkward to carry around as a hardback, but they don't have the hardback glamour, the kind that proclaims: "look at me, I'm a real book lover". And yet I've bought two of these oversized monsters lately: the already mentioned The Secret Life of William Shakespeare by Jude Morgan and, in spite of my firm intention of waiting for the (real, packable) paperback, Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel.
So why do it? Lack of patience plays a part, of course, but another factor is the longing for a read you know will be good, a sure thing. Morgan is one of the surest things going. I know I've said earlier that I prefer his Regency Romances to his more serious based-on-a-true-story historical fiction, but I'm starting to change my mind. True, in the more serious stuff you sometimes come across a somewhat too deep-seeming passage or a bewildering metaphor, but most of the time the author is spot-on, and he has a convincing quality that makes you think "yes, I bet X (=historical personage) was just like that". I gobbled up Secret Life in no time and wished it had been longer, especially as the action ends a bit abruptly.
I normally approve of Morgan's endings - for instance, he humanely chose to end The Taste of Sorrow with Charlotte Brontë contentedly married to Arthur Bell Nicholls instead of with her death - but here, I would have preferred him to go on, even if it did mean that he had to end at a less harmonious time in his subjects' life. Morgan tells part of the story from Mrs Shakespeare's, Anne's, point of view, and you have a feeling that he has an earnest wish for the Shakespeares' marriage to work out (which might explain why his Will is more than usually uxorious, only playing away after his marriage has broken down, if not quite irretrievably). When the book ends, it looks like the couple will be able to solve their differences, which is sweet in a way, but I mean - Will wasn't even done writing yet! I can't help feeling that there are more important things than his getting on with the little woman, who in spite of Morgan's best efforts still comes across as a bit of a stick-in-the-mud. And what about Ben Jonson, another important character in the book? He's left high and dry after suffering a great personal loss. I can think of more uplifting places to leave off a story, though Morgan's Jonson is so unshakeably self-confident you assume he'll bounce back from anything.
I realise that I, as a reader, may be partly responsible for the fact that Secret Life ends when it does. Morgan is probably one of those authors on a one-book-a-year contract, which means he can't go on spinning a yarn forever. And who demands such a punishing schedule from our favourite authors? We readers, that's who. Still, he could solve the problem by writing a sequel or, if necessary, a trilogy, which is what Mantel is doing with her Cromwell novels.
After Secret Life, I tried a historical novel with a Dickens theme, that turned out to be so flat I gave up in despair after only 50 pages. Then, I tried a novel by Joanna Trollope, The Men and the Girls - this one was well written, but not what you want to curl up with after a stressful day at work. The last thing you want to read about, when trying to forget your mundane but annoying problems, is other peoples' mundande but annoying problems. Fine for the lunch hour, but not for the bedside table. Enter oversized paperback number two, Bring Up the Bodies.
Oh, the bliss of reading something you actively enjoy. So far, I like Bring Up the Bodies even more than Mantel's first Cromwell novel Wolf Hall. Maybe it's because there's less ground to cover - only Anne Boleyn's fall from grace and the period leading up to it. I do miss Wolsey - long dead, but still fondly remembered by Cromwell - but bitchy Anne is always good fun. I can't say, this far, that the novel is as much of a white-wash of Thomas Cromwell as has been claimed. Yes, it does make a good deal of his good points - model father, kind employer, oh, and he has a social conscience too - but you still sense the full extent of his ruthlessness. And on the subject of Wolsey: Cromwell carries a grudge against all sorts of luckless bit-players who had anything to do with the cardinal's disgrace, but in the end, who carries the largest part of the blame? King Henry himself. So where's the seething revenge plot meant to bring him down?
The sweetest character in Bring Up the Bodies is Cromwell's son Gregory, tender and a bit gullible (though not as much as people think). Hm, hard-nosed dad, softie son - is this a family curse or what?
So why do it? Lack of patience plays a part, of course, but another factor is the longing for a read you know will be good, a sure thing. Morgan is one of the surest things going. I know I've said earlier that I prefer his Regency Romances to his more serious based-on-a-true-story historical fiction, but I'm starting to change my mind. True, in the more serious stuff you sometimes come across a somewhat too deep-seeming passage or a bewildering metaphor, but most of the time the author is spot-on, and he has a convincing quality that makes you think "yes, I bet X (=historical personage) was just like that". I gobbled up Secret Life in no time and wished it had been longer, especially as the action ends a bit abruptly.
I normally approve of Morgan's endings - for instance, he humanely chose to end The Taste of Sorrow with Charlotte Brontë contentedly married to Arthur Bell Nicholls instead of with her death - but here, I would have preferred him to go on, even if it did mean that he had to end at a less harmonious time in his subjects' life. Morgan tells part of the story from Mrs Shakespeare's, Anne's, point of view, and you have a feeling that he has an earnest wish for the Shakespeares' marriage to work out (which might explain why his Will is more than usually uxorious, only playing away after his marriage has broken down, if not quite irretrievably). When the book ends, it looks like the couple will be able to solve their differences, which is sweet in a way, but I mean - Will wasn't even done writing yet! I can't help feeling that there are more important things than his getting on with the little woman, who in spite of Morgan's best efforts still comes across as a bit of a stick-in-the-mud. And what about Ben Jonson, another important character in the book? He's left high and dry after suffering a great personal loss. I can think of more uplifting places to leave off a story, though Morgan's Jonson is so unshakeably self-confident you assume he'll bounce back from anything.
I realise that I, as a reader, may be partly responsible for the fact that Secret Life ends when it does. Morgan is probably one of those authors on a one-book-a-year contract, which means he can't go on spinning a yarn forever. And who demands such a punishing schedule from our favourite authors? We readers, that's who. Still, he could solve the problem by writing a sequel or, if necessary, a trilogy, which is what Mantel is doing with her Cromwell novels.
After Secret Life, I tried a historical novel with a Dickens theme, that turned out to be so flat I gave up in despair after only 50 pages. Then, I tried a novel by Joanna Trollope, The Men and the Girls - this one was well written, but not what you want to curl up with after a stressful day at work. The last thing you want to read about, when trying to forget your mundane but annoying problems, is other peoples' mundande but annoying problems. Fine for the lunch hour, but not for the bedside table. Enter oversized paperback number two, Bring Up the Bodies.
Oh, the bliss of reading something you actively enjoy. So far, I like Bring Up the Bodies even more than Mantel's first Cromwell novel Wolf Hall. Maybe it's because there's less ground to cover - only Anne Boleyn's fall from grace and the period leading up to it. I do miss Wolsey - long dead, but still fondly remembered by Cromwell - but bitchy Anne is always good fun. I can't say, this far, that the novel is as much of a white-wash of Thomas Cromwell as has been claimed. Yes, it does make a good deal of his good points - model father, kind employer, oh, and he has a social conscience too - but you still sense the full extent of his ruthlessness. And on the subject of Wolsey: Cromwell carries a grudge against all sorts of luckless bit-players who had anything to do with the cardinal's disgrace, but in the end, who carries the largest part of the blame? King Henry himself. So where's the seething revenge plot meant to bring him down?
The sweetest character in Bring Up the Bodies is Cromwell's son Gregory, tender and a bit gullible (though not as much as people think). Hm, hard-nosed dad, softie son - is this a family curse or what?
Monday, 20 August 2012
Life and works
After having enjoyed a spot of literary tourism during my holiday (one week still to go, thank Heaven) and having started on Jude Morgan’s latest – The Secret Life of William Shakespeare – I have reason to ask myself: why are we (people in general, and bookish people in particular) so interested in the lives of famous authors? After all, they often lead pretty unremarkable lives. Shakespeare is a case in point. True, his existence in London must have been mildly interesting, what with belonging to a company of players, getting chummy with a reckless earl, creating a character (Falstaff) who is such a hit with the monarch that she actually requests a sequel (royally commanded fan fiction!) etc. But we know next to nothing about his personality, and for all what we know to the contrary, his plays and poems have nothing whatsoever to do with his “real life”. Jane Austen is another example: I’m sure she herself took the fact that she “never met her Mr Darcy” with equanimity (how do we even know that Austen would have fancied a Mr Darcy?), but the lack of romance in her own life does come as a bit of a disappointment to her devoted readers. Even a flamboyant author like Dickens cannot hope to live a life that matches his novels in incident (or villain-intensity). So why do we insist on exploring our favourite authors’ lives – why can’t we be content with their works?
The greatest part of an author’s imaginary world will, I’m afraid, be available through their work only, and literary characters are for the most part figments of imagination. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t indulge ourselves with a bit of Narnia-chasing (if Morgan doesn’t go to town on Golden Youth-Dark Lady speculations, I, for one, will think it a lost opportunity). Even if we don’t find the passage to a magic kingdom, finding the wardrobe is nice enough in its way.
I think a lot can be explained by what I call the “passage to Narnia” factor. In the film Shadowlands, a small boy comes to visit C.S. Lewis (I believe it was a relative) and at once runs in search of the famous wardrobe. He finds it, but of course no passage to Narnia. Swallowing his disappointment, he reassures the author that he knew that it was just an ordinary wardrobe, really. This, of course, is perfectly true. But like the boy in the film, we can’t help hoping to find a gateway to the imaginary world of our famous authors, and we think getting closer to their lives will help us. After all, authors do sometimes use bits of their own life in their fiction, don’t they? Who’s to say that Viola, or Mr Darcy, or Uriah Heep never walked the Earth?
Because the primary interest is in the author’s creations, not him/herself, there is something melancholy about literary tourism, at least for my part. A chair that Dickens sat on can, sadly, never have the same apppeal for me as a chair belonging to James Carker, and I’ll never come across one of those because he never existed. And so I find myself having a great deal of sympathy with projects that try to link authors’ lives and works as much as possible. Flights of imagination in biodramas – such as making the foreman of the blacking factory in the TV series Dickens of London into an undeniably Heepian figure – are most welcome. But it can get out of hand. Remember the film Becoming Jane (one of the few Austen-related films I have not been able to sit through)? There, it was hinted that Jane Austen couldn’t possibly have written about love and sexual attraction without having experienced it first-hand. So whatever happened to the author’s imagination, then? As someone correctly and acidly pointed out, no-one presumes that Shakespeare had to murder someone in order to write The Scottish Play.
The greatest part of an author’s imaginary world will, I’m afraid, be available through their work only, and literary characters are for the most part figments of imagination. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t indulge ourselves with a bit of Narnia-chasing (if Morgan doesn’t go to town on Golden Youth-Dark Lady speculations, I, for one, will think it a lost opportunity). Even if we don’t find the passage to a magic kingdom, finding the wardrobe is nice enough in its way.
Tuesday, 7 August 2012
Holiday bubble
You’d think, wouldn’t you, that a proper four-week Swedish holiday would give one more time to blog, instead of less? Not so – the days are just dreamily flowing away, while I attempt to do as little as possible. A long-planned journey to the south of England (I’ll be avoiding London
While on the subject of the Olympics – wasn’t the Opening Ceremony great? Ooh, how I loved those Victorian factory-owners/engineers in their smart suits and top hats, headed by a Kenneth Branagh who was obviously having the time of his life. And those chimneys plunging out of the ground! And the molten iron Olympis Rings! “Pandemonium”? Looked more like heaven to me.
Of course, it was a misrepresentation of history to show pre-industrialBritain Man.
My reading has hardly been ambitious since the holidays, or even before then. A Weekend with Mr Darcy by Victoria Connelly fulfilled my need of an uncomplicated happy ending after Through a Glass Darkly. I wasn’t sure about Matt Rees’s Mozart’s Last Aria at first – I couldn’t quite warm to the novel’s narrator, Mozart’s sister Nannerl, who’s looking into her brother’s apparently suspicious death. However, things picked up when a love interest and a suitably formidable minister of police made their entrance. The ending was satisfyingly twisty, there was a terrific character-shows-his-true-villainous-colours-scene, and you’ll be glad to know that poor maligned Antonio Salieri did not do it. In fact he wasn’t even in the frame. The most page-turning holiday read so far, though, was Revenger by Toby Clements, a thriller set in Tudor times and featuring decent spy John Shakespeare (brother of William). The baddies (an increasingly alarming hoodlum and a magnificently foul-mouthed arch-enemy) were rougher than I’m used to but contributed to making the book a cracking good read.
Right now I’m half-way through Death Comes to Pemberley by P.D. James, and I must say I’m a bit disappointed this far. I confidently expected the crime plot to be a whodunnit with Pride and Prejudice characters as the suspects; sadly, though, the novel is more of a police procedural. The victim is not, as we are first led to think, George Wickham but his comrade-in-arms Captain Denny, and Wickham is the chief suspect. But apart from him and possibly Colonel Fitzwilliam (whom James plainly does not like), the Pride and Prejudice characters all have comfortable alibis: the coppers won’t be asking Lady Catherine to help with their inquiries any time soon. Thumbnail sketches of the harsh-but-fair magistrate and the medical expert prove more vivid than the Austen characters. A family of servants is introduced and will probably have some bearing on the case, but though I like Upstairs Downstairs-dramas, I must confess to having zilch interest in this plot-line. If Wickham and/or Denny has caused some domestic upset in the servant household and this proves to be the explanation of the murder, then why drag Pemberley into it at all? The book could in that case just as well have been about another regency estate altogether.
As I enjoy James’s usual prose style, I also thought it unnecessary of her to use a vaguely Austenesque style for this novel. It’s elegant but not as pithy as Austen, and I think it sould have been wiser to use the tried-and-true Jamesian psychological-crime-story-style. The crime story seems to take precedent over the sequel element anyway.
While on the subject of the Olympics – wasn’t the Opening Ceremony great? Ooh, how I loved those Victorian factory-owners/engineers in their smart suits and top hats, headed by a Kenneth Branagh who was obviously having the time of his life. And those chimneys plunging out of the ground! And the molten iron Olympis Rings! “Pandemonium”? Looked more like heaven to me.
Of course, it was a misrepresentation of history to show pre-industrial
My reading has hardly been ambitious since the holidays, or even before then. A Weekend with Mr Darcy by Victoria Connelly fulfilled my need of an uncomplicated happy ending after Through a Glass Darkly. I wasn’t sure about Matt Rees’s Mozart’s Last Aria at first – I couldn’t quite warm to the novel’s narrator, Mozart’s sister Nannerl, who’s looking into her brother’s apparently suspicious death. However, things picked up when a love interest and a suitably formidable minister of police made their entrance. The ending was satisfyingly twisty, there was a terrific character-shows-his-true-villainous-colours-scene, and you’ll be glad to know that poor maligned Antonio Salieri did not do it. In fact he wasn’t even in the frame. The most page-turning holiday read so far, though, was Revenger by Toby Clements, a thriller set in Tudor times and featuring decent spy John Shakespeare (brother of William). The baddies (an increasingly alarming hoodlum and a magnificently foul-mouthed arch-enemy) were rougher than I’m used to but contributed to making the book a cracking good read.
Right now I’m half-way through Death Comes to Pemberley by P.D. James, and I must say I’m a bit disappointed this far. I confidently expected the crime plot to be a whodunnit with Pride and Prejudice characters as the suspects; sadly, though, the novel is more of a police procedural. The victim is not, as we are first led to think, George Wickham but his comrade-in-arms Captain Denny, and Wickham is the chief suspect. But apart from him and possibly Colonel Fitzwilliam (whom James plainly does not like), the Pride and Prejudice characters all have comfortable alibis: the coppers won’t be asking Lady Catherine to help with their inquiries any time soon. Thumbnail sketches of the harsh-but-fair magistrate and the medical expert prove more vivid than the Austen characters. A family of servants is introduced and will probably have some bearing on the case, but though I like Upstairs Downstairs-dramas, I must confess to having zilch interest in this plot-line. If Wickham and/or Denny has caused some domestic upset in the servant household and this proves to be the explanation of the murder, then why drag Pemberley into it at all? The book could in that case just as well have been about another regency estate altogether.
As I enjoy James’s usual prose style, I also thought it unnecessary of her to use a vaguely Austenesque style for this novel. It’s elegant but not as pithy as Austen, and I think it sould have been wiser to use the tried-and-true Jamesian psychological-crime-story-style. The crime story seems to take precedent over the sequel element anyway.
Wednesday, 25 July 2012
The pleasures of objectifying
A worrying change has come over me lately: I'm suddenly more sensitive to male beauty than I used to. When I caught myself spending the best part of an old Midsomer Murders episode thinking "Wow, look at that mad scientist's cheekbones" it started to bother me a bit. What's happening to me? One of the pluses with being a villain-lover is surely that it opens your mind and makes you appreciate other things than mere shallow good looks: after all, few villains are conventionally handsome, and the exceptions are often worthless, lazy skirt-chasers. It's not that I've degenerated completely. Brainy is still the new sexy: brains are about the only thing all my villain crushes have in common, besides being up to no good (so far: with my luck, my next crush will be a real dolt). Also, I'm still into the classical villain look as well: leanness, pallor, cold grey eyes, thin lips and generally fox-like demeanour. Only, when it comes to men, classical beauty has become a bonus for me in a way it wasn't before.
Hopefully it's just a phase, triggered by the fact that significant minor baddies - and some of the major ones - in my book and TV diet the last year or so have been decidedly cute, and not just from a villain-loving perspective. But it may - and this is why I worry about it - be a sign that I'm getting older. When you're in your twenties, you tend not to care about appearances that much when contemplating men, and certainly not about youth. Why, you've got it yourself, haven't you? Memories of the unlovely teenagers who harassed you at school are still vivid enough for the term "pretty boy" to sound like an oxymoron. That's at least how it was for me. Now I've acquired the "maturity" I hankered after as a young thing, other characteristics start to gain in importance and attractiveness. Like cheekbones. Not to put too fine a point on it, I'm in danger of becoming a dirty old woman (with time - it's not as if I'm old yet).
"Dirty old woman" is not a phrase you encounter that often, but I have the uneasy feeling it will become more and more common. It started with campaigns against "objectifying" led by angry women who'd had enough of being ogled by drips. There was much talk of such things as "the male gaze". Now, I understand these women's predicament, but really only all-out babes are ogled to such a degree that it becomes oppressive. Because these stunners object so strongly against being "objectified", however, men are intimidated and women like myself, who could do with a bit of objectification now and then, get even less of it than we used to. But the unkindest cut of all is that now men have caught on to the notion. I remember how shocked I was when I first came across the complaint from men (in a newspaper article) that they do not want to be eyed up by women as they feel demeaned by it, poor dears. So, to sum up: not only do I have to forgo any scrap of "male gaze" that might have come my way because better-looking women are incensed by it; I should also please refrain from comfort fantasies that may be demeaning to men? More and more, I feel a serious grievance towards the babes who started all this. If men are not allowed to gaze, and women are not allowed to gaze, how will the human species survive?
Of course, I may be blaming the wrong people. Maybe men are being disingenuous when they claim that they cannot for the life of them determine when a flirtatious glance may be welcome, so therefore they will not flirt at all and expect us to behave with likewise propriety. Is it really that hard to crack the behaviour code? Exchanging smiles at the water-cooler: OK. Pinching your secretary's bottom: should be avoided (if she's your personal secretary, chances are she's not overly fond of you as it is). Concentrating on a woman's legs when she's telling you things of vital importance for the company you work for: downright daft.
Once again, fictional villains come up trumps - not only are they not able to complain against being "objectified", they would never entertaining the notion for a second if they could complain. So I can keep objectifying away. I'll have to watch my new-found interest in good-looking men, however. Slim prettiness is all right and eminently villain-compatible (though an admiration for that kind of looks can lead to difficulties in real life - men have a tendency to snaffle the prettiest of their own sex themselves). But when I start admiring muscles and the tall, sturdy ape-man type, then I'll know that I've gone too far.
Hopefully it's just a phase, triggered by the fact that significant minor baddies - and some of the major ones - in my book and TV diet the last year or so have been decidedly cute, and not just from a villain-loving perspective. But it may - and this is why I worry about it - be a sign that I'm getting older. When you're in your twenties, you tend not to care about appearances that much when contemplating men, and certainly not about youth. Why, you've got it yourself, haven't you? Memories of the unlovely teenagers who harassed you at school are still vivid enough for the term "pretty boy" to sound like an oxymoron. That's at least how it was for me. Now I've acquired the "maturity" I hankered after as a young thing, other characteristics start to gain in importance and attractiveness. Like cheekbones. Not to put too fine a point on it, I'm in danger of becoming a dirty old woman (with time - it's not as if I'm old yet).
"Dirty old woman" is not a phrase you encounter that often, but I have the uneasy feeling it will become more and more common. It started with campaigns against "objectifying" led by angry women who'd had enough of being ogled by drips. There was much talk of such things as "the male gaze". Now, I understand these women's predicament, but really only all-out babes are ogled to such a degree that it becomes oppressive. Because these stunners object so strongly against being "objectified", however, men are intimidated and women like myself, who could do with a bit of objectification now and then, get even less of it than we used to. But the unkindest cut of all is that now men have caught on to the notion. I remember how shocked I was when I first came across the complaint from men (in a newspaper article) that they do not want to be eyed up by women as they feel demeaned by it, poor dears. So, to sum up: not only do I have to forgo any scrap of "male gaze" that might have come my way because better-looking women are incensed by it; I should also please refrain from comfort fantasies that may be demeaning to men? More and more, I feel a serious grievance towards the babes who started all this. If men are not allowed to gaze, and women are not allowed to gaze, how will the human species survive?
Of course, I may be blaming the wrong people. Maybe men are being disingenuous when they claim that they cannot for the life of them determine when a flirtatious glance may be welcome, so therefore they will not flirt at all and expect us to behave with likewise propriety. Is it really that hard to crack the behaviour code? Exchanging smiles at the water-cooler: OK. Pinching your secretary's bottom: should be avoided (if she's your personal secretary, chances are she's not overly fond of you as it is). Concentrating on a woman's legs when she's telling you things of vital importance for the company you work for: downright daft.
Once again, fictional villains come up trumps - not only are they not able to complain against being "objectified", they would never entertaining the notion for a second if they could complain. So I can keep objectifying away. I'll have to watch my new-found interest in good-looking men, however. Slim prettiness is all right and eminently villain-compatible (though an admiration for that kind of looks can lead to difficulties in real life - men have a tendency to snaffle the prettiest of their own sex themselves). But when I start admiring muscles and the tall, sturdy ape-man type, then I'll know that I've gone too far.
Thursday, 12 July 2012
Warning: Book contains deaths
My so-called bodice-ripper read Through A Glass Darkly has proved a shock to me - by not being a bodice-ripper at all. I doubt that it even qualifies as "historical romance". Not only is the ending in the "tomorrow is another day" line rather than "they lived happily ever after" - Gone With The Wind survived that and is still considered a romance - but there are simply too many deaths in it. And not just any old periferal deaths; deaths which hit the poor heroine where it hurts the most. Scarlett O'Hara was lucky in comparison. What with one darned thing after another, it is surprising Lady Devane isn't nicknamed Calamity Barbara.
To be fair, Through A Glass Darkly never claimed to be a bodice-ripper, though apparently it did win a prize for "Best Historical Romance" when it came out. I just assumed it was one because Dark Angels was. I should have heeded the warning signs: the blurb of Through A Glass Darkly mentions that Barbara and prize prat Roger are "star-crossed", and the first time someone used that word to describe a couple it wasn't good news. The novel is best seen as historical fiction, pure and simple, with plenty of relationship drama and gossip. Heady romance, however, proves difficult with a male protagonist as insensitive as Roger, who ends up behaving impossibly both as a husband and as an object of villain affection. And then the deaths rain down, accompanied at times by financial ruin.
Not quite the easy read I imagined, then - but still a good read. And yet, I have to face facts. For years I have tried to be mature about books and endings, telling myself that from my point of view - the villain-lover's - 90% of all books end unhappily anyway. I have seriously considered different theories as to what makes a good ending. There was one I read about in an article on Great Expectations which sounded quite persuasive, about "static" and "dynamic" endings. As I understood it, "dynamic" endings made you imagine a continued life for the characters full of ups and downs, just like the novel you'd been reading, while "static" endings froze the picture instead, leaving the characters in a state of happiness or misery for the rest of their lives. The best endings were, of course, the "dynamic" ones.
I have come to realise, though, that I simply prefer happy endings. I really do. I would much rather have a static happy ending than a dynamic one where the main protagonist is knee-deep in corpses. And is that so strange? We are invited to feel for the characters in a book, aren't we? Is it so surprising that we would like them to do well, rather than the opposite? I have grumbled before about sophisticates who like to wallow in endings where everything goes to the dogs, but only now have I fully confessed to myself why they annoy me so much. My name is Georgiana (no, not really), and I'm a happy-ending addict.
Having said all that, I have already ordered the sequel to Through A Glass Darkly, Now Face To Face, though I've understood from Amazon reviews (I've done my homework this time) that the ending isn't completely satisfactory here either. I still hope that the death rate will sink to an acceptable Dark Angels level, and after all, the villain is still alive.
To be fair, Through A Glass Darkly never claimed to be a bodice-ripper, though apparently it did win a prize for "Best Historical Romance" when it came out. I just assumed it was one because Dark Angels was. I should have heeded the warning signs: the blurb of Through A Glass Darkly mentions that Barbara and prize prat Roger are "star-crossed", and the first time someone used that word to describe a couple it wasn't good news. The novel is best seen as historical fiction, pure and simple, with plenty of relationship drama and gossip. Heady romance, however, proves difficult with a male protagonist as insensitive as Roger, who ends up behaving impossibly both as a husband and as an object of villain affection. And then the deaths rain down, accompanied at times by financial ruin.
Not quite the easy read I imagined, then - but still a good read. And yet, I have to face facts. For years I have tried to be mature about books and endings, telling myself that from my point of view - the villain-lover's - 90% of all books end unhappily anyway. I have seriously considered different theories as to what makes a good ending. There was one I read about in an article on Great Expectations which sounded quite persuasive, about "static" and "dynamic" endings. As I understood it, "dynamic" endings made you imagine a continued life for the characters full of ups and downs, just like the novel you'd been reading, while "static" endings froze the picture instead, leaving the characters in a state of happiness or misery for the rest of their lives. The best endings were, of course, the "dynamic" ones.
I have come to realise, though, that I simply prefer happy endings. I really do. I would much rather have a static happy ending than a dynamic one where the main protagonist is knee-deep in corpses. And is that so strange? We are invited to feel for the characters in a book, aren't we? Is it so surprising that we would like them to do well, rather than the opposite? I have grumbled before about sophisticates who like to wallow in endings where everything goes to the dogs, but only now have I fully confessed to myself why they annoy me so much. My name is Georgiana (no, not really), and I'm a happy-ending addict.
Having said all that, I have already ordered the sequel to Through A Glass Darkly, Now Face To Face, though I've understood from Amazon reviews (I've done my homework this time) that the ending isn't completely satisfactory here either. I still hope that the death rate will sink to an acceptable Dark Angels level, and after all, the villain is still alive.
Wednesday, 4 July 2012
The uses and hazards of corrective historical fiction
I still remember when I realised that the picture of the French Revolution painted in the Scarlet Pimpernel books may not be the whole truth (in fact not true at all, as it later turned out). It was when, as a young girl, I read a novel called Jacobin's Daughter by Joanne Williamson. It told the story of the Duplay family, with whom Maximilien Robespierre lodged in Paris, and the protagonist is the youngest Duplay daughter Babette. It appealed very much to my girlish romantic mind - Babette's own love story ending with her marriage to Robespierre-chum Philippe Lebas is made much of, naturally, and the author has chosen to depict Babette's sister Eléonore's love for Robespierre as being requited - and made a lasting impression. Where were the blood-thirsty, brutal monsters of the Scarlet Pimpernel books? Suddenly, the revolution's leaders were seen in a new light, as pleasant and well-meaning young men.
Of course the view on Robespierre and the rest is rose-tinted, as you'd expect when the story is told by an idealistic young girl full of sisterly fondness for her family's nice lodger. But for its (mainly young) readers, the book acts as a counterweight to tales of stricken noblemen hounded by dirty revolutionaries. On its own, it is as one-sided as the Scarlet Pimpernel books, but in the context of putting the other guy's case it made my (and I'm guessing many other readers') overall view of the French Revolution more rounded. I've read more balanced accounts of the French Revolution since which counteract the Pimpernel's perfidious influence, but Williamson was first.
What prompted this memory was an unusually sour review of Hilary Mantel's second novel about Thomas Cromwell, Bring Up The Bodies. The reviewer's main quarrel with the novel seems to be that it depicts Cromwell in such a favourable light, and by doing so risks giving readers the wrong idea about Tudor history. In one way, I have sympathy for the reviewer's plight: she is obviously a great admirer of Thomas More, so reading a book told from Cromwell's point of view must be utterly distasteful to her. It's as if I had been forced to read (oh horrid thought) a novel painting a rosy picture of Talleyrand. But surely she is missing the point of Mantel's enterprise, which is to give a historical personage otherwise largely vilified his day in court.
Where else will you find a defence of Thomas Cromwell? In popular fiction and TV dramas like The Tudors and Henry VIII he is depicted, at best as a wily and weaselly courtier, at worst as a queen-murdering monastery-burning bully. Mantel's novels (I haven't read Bring Up The Bodies yet, I'm waiting for the paperback, but I have read Wolf Hall) simply tell the other side of the story. And isn't it about time someone tried to? In my view, the Sainted More has had things his own way for far too long. This humourless, Richard-III-slandering, collective-property-extolling prig certainly can't complain of usually getting a bad press, quite the contrary. Mantel's novels are examples - like Jacobin's Daughter and Gone With The Wind - of "corrective" historical fiction, shining a light on a point in history from an unexpected angle. These accounts, biased as they are, are the answer to other biased accounts which have long held sway over the popular imagination.
Having said that, there is a risk of going too far in this kind of fiction. You can be as biased as you like, but there is a limit to how much you can allow yourself to twist the truth. I did think Gone With The Wind crossed the line at times, quite blatantly - sorry, Ashley and his pals are the members of what? As for Mantel, if she really does try to fudge the issue of how the confessions of Anne Boleyn's supposed lovers were extricated, as the reviewer claims, then she is cheating. Given the fact that they were innocent, and facing charges of high treason which meant death by barbaric means, somehow I don't think they spilled the beans during a friendly chat.
After all, part of the interest of "corrective" fiction is to see how certain compromising events are, as it were, explained away. Its subjects are seldom all-out heroic. Cromwell did make sure, among other things, that a woman and a handful of men were executed on trumped-up charges just because the king felt like getting himself a new wife. The Reign of Terror during the French Revolution was ghastly and led to innocent people (most of them non-aristocratic) having their head chopped off, or worse. And don't get me started on the Old South. But this doesn't mean that history isn't much more complex than various moralists have claimed. Bring up the apologia for Cromwell, and let's hear what he (through Mantel) has to say for himself.
Of course the view on Robespierre and the rest is rose-tinted, as you'd expect when the story is told by an idealistic young girl full of sisterly fondness for her family's nice lodger. But for its (mainly young) readers, the book acts as a counterweight to tales of stricken noblemen hounded by dirty revolutionaries. On its own, it is as one-sided as the Scarlet Pimpernel books, but in the context of putting the other guy's case it made my (and I'm guessing many other readers') overall view of the French Revolution more rounded. I've read more balanced accounts of the French Revolution since which counteract the Pimpernel's perfidious influence, but Williamson was first.
What prompted this memory was an unusually sour review of Hilary Mantel's second novel about Thomas Cromwell, Bring Up The Bodies. The reviewer's main quarrel with the novel seems to be that it depicts Cromwell in such a favourable light, and by doing so risks giving readers the wrong idea about Tudor history. In one way, I have sympathy for the reviewer's plight: she is obviously a great admirer of Thomas More, so reading a book told from Cromwell's point of view must be utterly distasteful to her. It's as if I had been forced to read (oh horrid thought) a novel painting a rosy picture of Talleyrand. But surely she is missing the point of Mantel's enterprise, which is to give a historical personage otherwise largely vilified his day in court.
Where else will you find a defence of Thomas Cromwell? In popular fiction and TV dramas like The Tudors and Henry VIII he is depicted, at best as a wily and weaselly courtier, at worst as a queen-murdering monastery-burning bully. Mantel's novels (I haven't read Bring Up The Bodies yet, I'm waiting for the paperback, but I have read Wolf Hall) simply tell the other side of the story. And isn't it about time someone tried to? In my view, the Sainted More has had things his own way for far too long. This humourless, Richard-III-slandering, collective-property-extolling prig certainly can't complain of usually getting a bad press, quite the contrary. Mantel's novels are examples - like Jacobin's Daughter and Gone With The Wind - of "corrective" historical fiction, shining a light on a point in history from an unexpected angle. These accounts, biased as they are, are the answer to other biased accounts which have long held sway over the popular imagination.
Having said that, there is a risk of going too far in this kind of fiction. You can be as biased as you like, but there is a limit to how much you can allow yourself to twist the truth. I did think Gone With The Wind crossed the line at times, quite blatantly - sorry, Ashley and his pals are the members of what? As for Mantel, if she really does try to fudge the issue of how the confessions of Anne Boleyn's supposed lovers were extricated, as the reviewer claims, then she is cheating. Given the fact that they were innocent, and facing charges of high treason which meant death by barbaric means, somehow I don't think they spilled the beans during a friendly chat.
After all, part of the interest of "corrective" fiction is to see how certain compromising events are, as it were, explained away. Its subjects are seldom all-out heroic. Cromwell did make sure, among other things, that a woman and a handful of men were executed on trumped-up charges just because the king felt like getting himself a new wife. The Reign of Terror during the French Revolution was ghastly and led to innocent people (most of them non-aristocratic) having their head chopped off, or worse. And don't get me started on the Old South. But this doesn't mean that history isn't much more complex than various moralists have claimed. Bring up the apologia for Cromwell, and let's hear what he (through Mantel) has to say for himself.
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