historical romance can bite it. imo.
8 Nov 2009 01:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kaigouA few weeks ago, I picked up a historical romance solely on the basis of a review over at Dear Author, and even granted that historical romance is so very far from my thing, in this particular instance I was intrigued by the reviewer's observation that the story's conflict was almost entirely internal. I'm used to, and usually prefer to read (and write) stories with a much stronger external conflict, so I was curious how a story works out when the conflict is internal. Well, assuming it's not one of the wants-to-be-literary, all-talk-no-action, kind of Important Work that's doing its best to mimic a French film: lots of people talking about sex and philosophy but not really doing much other than drinking too much wine, angsting a bit, and chain-smoking.
Okay, so the historical romance had none of the chain-smoking and so on, and it was rather intriguing from a deconstructionist viewpoint to read a story that, yes, really was almost entirely internal, but... man. I didn't bother to finish it. Just couldn't, for two reasons.
The first was more a symptom of how much I'm a modern person, and far from a romantic about any past era, really. In a nutshell, the heroine is supposedly a daring kind of bad-girl for her era, up to no good. Including the moment when she starts tipsily making out with her best friend, which is then interrupted by best friend's older brother -- and older brother's mistress, who is herself a married woman (to some other man). The mistress, being a snotty kind of greedy Fallen Woman stereotype (and I'll just say it now: I know it's a genre standby & title, 'Fallen Woman' but man I freaking hate what's hiding in that title), naturally threatens to tell everyone unless Older Brother continues to be her paramour. And, of course, one whisper and heroine will be ruined, ruined, I say!
Somewhere about a third of the way into the book, as everyone is dashing about trying to stifle the impending doom of a Girl Gone Bad (or at least her reputation), and Older Brother is fighting his attraction while heroine and best friend are unhappily agreeing to wed, and best friend's own mistress gets her heart broken, blah blah blah... I started thinking about what's required for blackmail, and more specifically, for the threat of blackmail to have any weight.
That is, I'm willing to grant that some rumors are so juicy there will always be those who believe them. But that also requires that others -- especially in an instance like this -- corroborate the rumormonger/witness' words. The mistress walks into a room and sees two people making out, and is herself accompanied by a fourth person. The story's own implications, early on (I think in referring to earlier stories in the series) were that a woman protesting her innocence has absolutely no value against a single man casting aspersion. But if the man himself (both men, in this case) stand to lose, do they really lose more by doing the simple thing of stating that they believe the heroine's innocence rather than the rumormonger?
Hrm, how to put it. I recall back in college being terribly impressed at a friend's reaction when her boyfriend said he'd heard rumors from a third friend that she'd messed around on him. She pulled herself up to her full height and said, in a beautifully chilly tone, "and you believed him?" I've heard (and said myself) variations on this theme, and it's a dynamic I think is too often underrepresented in life and in fiction. Quite simply: the one with the power is the one who decides the truth. To question the suspicious one's statement by turning it around like that is to put oneself back into the position of power by basically dismissing the suspicions, and the one who spread it as well as the one who believed it. Person A is saying, really: Someone says you did a bad thing, and I gave them the time of day when they did; Person B's reply turns this around and instead of defending, goes on a subtle but effective attack -- but it really only works when you've got the power-end of the dynamic (by any means, including actually being in the right).
In other words, the story's plot fell apart if the men screwed their heads on straight and used their positions of power to sniff at the mistress (and any who believed her rumors) by saying, "You really should consider the source." The mistress was hardly a stunning paragon of society, after all, and easy enough to use that against her, and avoid the entire fiasco that drives the book's plot. (A'course, then it would've been a much shorter book.) It just seemed odd to me that the power of men's words -- when it came to breaking a woman's reputation -- couldn't be used, or didn't even occur to the author to be used, in the opposite direction.
But what really made me stop reading was that I couldn't figure out when the story happened.
I'm not entirely clueless -- I do know what a fichu is (thanks, Gramma!) -- and I'm used to some of the expressions, since you also come across them when reading historical non-fiction. Stuff like the 'ton' (which I will never say in the English manner, of rhyming it with tone even though I know full well that's where we get 'tony' as slang for 'hip and hoity'), which indicates Georgian period... which is almost a hundred years' span. If I presume Regency, that in fact is only a seven-year stretch, which is barely a blip against the length of most lifetimes. I couldn't entire assume Regency, seeing how the story apparently has six or seven earlier books in the story, so maybe this was happening at the tail-end or was at the very entrance of the Victorian years. Who knows.
Because there wasn't a single item or prop or article anywhere in the story that placed it. Not a one, and I actually started looking very early on. Like, within the first two or three pages. They're at a ball, and I realized not a single character's gown or coat or hat had been described, that not a single political reference had been made, nothing. I started flipping back, then forward, looking for something to set the time period, then I started reading with half my mind on the story and the other half scanning the text for something to tell me when it took place. Any note of the type of carriage, or the type of saddle used, or the way dresses were laced, or the style of shawl or the number of feathers in a goddamn hat. Not a single blooming thing.
The use of trains are a good example. The hero supposedly has his own private car, and that had me utterly baffled. Either it was terribly anachronistic, or the Regency time period covers a helluva lot bigger time than I was aware. For starters, technically the Regency is like 1810 to 1820, when England did have a Regent running things; I'm aware that some broaden this to stretch up to late 1830s, 1837 IIRC, when Queen Victoria took the throne. The problem with that is that the first train line that ran into London was, as far as I can tell, the London & Birmingham, which officially opened for business when, or shortly after, Victoria was crowned. That puts it out of the Regency era, so maybe the story was supposed to be non-Regency Regency? Hell if I know.
It ended up rendering the entire story really damn flat for me. It felt unhooked from its mooring, like it drifted aimlessly in a sort of never-never-land of faux aristocratic hauteur where everyone's so pressed about the details -- except that the author herself is just really coy about handing out those details. It felt like reading fanfiction, actually, when you don't know the fandom, and the author assumes you do, so just doesn't bother to mention any of a hundred things. It's just assumed you know this shit already, yo, and since (almost) everyone reading or agenting or editing also reads the same fandom, well, it'd never occur to them, either, that not everyone's going to walk into the story knowing ahead of time all the bothersome details about who's in parliament, or the latest scandal on the broadsheets, or even the line of a skirt or the height of a hem or whether the waistline rides high under the breasts or has settled down to more of a natural waist-level.
No wonder the book's cover had the heroine wearing a dress that looked like someone's second-hand version of a bad Ren Faire gown: there wasn't really a single clue in the book that could tie it down to a time period other than somewhere roughly between 1838, when steam train lines were opened to and becoming popular with the public, and around the 1930s, when Brit railways started experimenting with diesels.
I'm not asking for a specific day month and year, but bloody hell, an entire century of generalized looseness is just a bit much. Add in the wacky requirement that I suspend my disbelief such that the word of three people -- at least two of whom are either a) relatively upstanding members of society, b) at least members of an influential family, and c) MALE -- mean absolutely nothing compared to an adulterous, gambling-addicted, mistress. Riiiiiight.
And then tonight I finished another one I'd tracked down (on the basis of a review, I think, but now I can't recall where, though fortunately the book was pretty cheap thanks to discounts) -- and while this one scored major points for placing the story squarely in a time-period, it had a few trailing ends that weren't just left trailing, but felt like the author had started to go in one direction and then forgotten about that and never went back. But what really got me was the notion that for the heroine's luuurve to be okay, her paramour had to cast aside his claims of being a common man and reveal himself as a duke, or a marquis, or whatever-the-hell he is.
Here, all along, the author had been a) telling me the paramour had a pretty cozy life thanks to being highly successful at what he did, and b) emphasizing repeatedly the heroine's ease with this less-intense, less-class-based lifestyle, and even c) the heroine's own wish to be highly unconventional in having some kind of a business venture of her own, and to even d) evade marriage altogether if it meant being stuck in the house as baby-making machine. Hell, the author was even tossing around some pretty wild implications about just what artists get up to (though stopping short of handing anyone an opium pipe, but sheesh, the story and time period was begging for it).
Although I must admit as a somewhat casual lover of portraiture and art, I was rather confused at times as to just what the hero's artistic style was. The story's set in 1875, but the hero's style is alternately described in a way that made me think of Impressionism and then a different picture represented as Naturalism, and those styles are pretty opposite each other. Not to mention the pivotal work in the story sounds strongly Pre-Raphaelite, a style popular twenty-five years before the story was set -- even if William Morris was still going strong in 1875. Or the mention of Rushkin (the critic), who was already pretty unhinged by the early 1870s, so I have trouble going with the notion that his word still held water by 1875, let alone enough water to destroy a painter's career. Or the mention of the London underground, which was partially already built by 1875 but IIRC was entirely in private hands (and several different private hands at that), so I'm not sure why the House of Lords would be having anything to do with what was essentially several different companies development -- but the details were foggy, so again, only a mention but not enough to really show either research or lack thereof. Or the fact that a fellow artist's work is described in almost Expressionist terms, which is twenty-five years' early anachronism, ignoring that Expressionism was really a Continental/Germanic movement, and not a school of art normally associated with UK artists.
And then there were things that had me really tilting my head and squinting, like the heroine's admission that she'd like to see the Forbidden City. Okay. I'm willing to accept that the heroine would have absolutely no idea of China's strife following the Second Opium War (let alone its issues with Britain and British subjects), and willing to accept that the author is trying to tell me that the heroine dreams big. Until later in the story, when the heroine sees the hero's bed, and says it's Japanese, and then describes it... and that's Chinoiserie if I've ever heard it. I was left wondering whether I was supposed to conclude that the heroine is, in fact, utterly ignorant of anything about China (or Asia, in general) other than the romantic notion of 'The Forbidden City' so as to make such a blatant mix-up between two radically different bed-styles, especially seeing how Chinoiserie was so massively popular in the late Victorian era. I'd think the most likely assumption would be that the bed is Chinese, not Japanese, and ended up not sure whether it was the character's ignorance or the author's.
None of that necessarily detracted from the story itself, which was otherwise adequately entertaining to keep reading, but when I got to the end and we get the reveal that the hero is also from A Good Family and comes with handy title of his own... I dunno. I felt like I'd read this story one too many times: oh, noes, they can't marry because she's white and he's a native, until at the last minute you find out that he's not really native, he was just adopted, and like Mister Tarzan, he's spent time re-acculturating himself to be a Proper British Gentleman (which, yes, the painter/hero even does), and then he can marry her after all. The implication being that if he were, in fact, really native then of course he couldn't marry her -- or really a commoner, or really a black man, or really a whatever that's not titled rich white male gentry.
Maybe the story's written for people who like the notion of women dallying with those 'of a lower station,' but only if in the end the woman ends up marrying someone of her own class. Can it not be true love, otherwise? Even if as a working man, the hero is successful enough on his own terms to not need his landed gentry income at all? It doesn't miss me that in the stories where the woman is lower class than the man, this seems to be less of a problem -- I guess it's okay if a woman marries up, so long as she doesn't marry down. Maybe because the social status granted by her husband is the only social status she really has?
I know I've read historical-romance/fiction fans' comments that anything less would be ahistorical, but that's not necessarily true. There were love-matches, especially among artisans, who could reach much higher thanks to patronage. Not penny-common, but not four-leaf-clover rare, either. More to the point, I have major trouble believing some of those fans have the least bit of clue about what, exactly, is historically accurate and what's not, if the stories they laud as 'beautifully historical' are so completely lacking in details that I can't even pin down a general decade.
Shorter kaigou: whomever likes this genre is welcome to it, because that was more than enough for me. Cripes, these stories make Clavell look like an unparalleled linguistic genius, and that's saying something.
Okay, so the historical romance had none of the chain-smoking and so on, and it was rather intriguing from a deconstructionist viewpoint to read a story that, yes, really was almost entirely internal, but... man. I didn't bother to finish it. Just couldn't, for two reasons.
The first was more a symptom of how much I'm a modern person, and far from a romantic about any past era, really. In a nutshell, the heroine is supposedly a daring kind of bad-girl for her era, up to no good. Including the moment when she starts tipsily making out with her best friend, which is then interrupted by best friend's older brother -- and older brother's mistress, who is herself a married woman (to some other man). The mistress, being a snotty kind of greedy Fallen Woman stereotype (and I'll just say it now: I know it's a genre standby & title, 'Fallen Woman' but man I freaking hate what's hiding in that title), naturally threatens to tell everyone unless Older Brother continues to be her paramour. And, of course, one whisper and heroine will be ruined, ruined, I say!
Somewhere about a third of the way into the book, as everyone is dashing about trying to stifle the impending doom of a Girl Gone Bad (or at least her reputation), and Older Brother is fighting his attraction while heroine and best friend are unhappily agreeing to wed, and best friend's own mistress gets her heart broken, blah blah blah... I started thinking about what's required for blackmail, and more specifically, for the threat of blackmail to have any weight.
That is, I'm willing to grant that some rumors are so juicy there will always be those who believe them. But that also requires that others -- especially in an instance like this -- corroborate the rumormonger/witness' words. The mistress walks into a room and sees two people making out, and is herself accompanied by a fourth person. The story's own implications, early on (I think in referring to earlier stories in the series) were that a woman protesting her innocence has absolutely no value against a single man casting aspersion. But if the man himself (both men, in this case) stand to lose, do they really lose more by doing the simple thing of stating that they believe the heroine's innocence rather than the rumormonger?
Hrm, how to put it. I recall back in college being terribly impressed at a friend's reaction when her boyfriend said he'd heard rumors from a third friend that she'd messed around on him. She pulled herself up to her full height and said, in a beautifully chilly tone, "and you believed him?" I've heard (and said myself) variations on this theme, and it's a dynamic I think is too often underrepresented in life and in fiction. Quite simply: the one with the power is the one who decides the truth. To question the suspicious one's statement by turning it around like that is to put oneself back into the position of power by basically dismissing the suspicions, and the one who spread it as well as the one who believed it. Person A is saying, really: Someone says you did a bad thing, and I gave them the time of day when they did; Person B's reply turns this around and instead of defending, goes on a subtle but effective attack -- but it really only works when you've got the power-end of the dynamic (by any means, including actually being in the right).
In other words, the story's plot fell apart if the men screwed their heads on straight and used their positions of power to sniff at the mistress (and any who believed her rumors) by saying, "You really should consider the source." The mistress was hardly a stunning paragon of society, after all, and easy enough to use that against her, and avoid the entire fiasco that drives the book's plot. (A'course, then it would've been a much shorter book.) It just seemed odd to me that the power of men's words -- when it came to breaking a woman's reputation -- couldn't be used, or didn't even occur to the author to be used, in the opposite direction.
But what really made me stop reading was that I couldn't figure out when the story happened.
I'm not entirely clueless -- I do know what a fichu is (thanks, Gramma!) -- and I'm used to some of the expressions, since you also come across them when reading historical non-fiction. Stuff like the 'ton' (which I will never say in the English manner, of rhyming it with tone even though I know full well that's where we get 'tony' as slang for 'hip and hoity'), which indicates Georgian period... which is almost a hundred years' span. If I presume Regency, that in fact is only a seven-year stretch, which is barely a blip against the length of most lifetimes. I couldn't entire assume Regency, seeing how the story apparently has six or seven earlier books in the story, so maybe this was happening at the tail-end or was at the very entrance of the Victorian years. Who knows.
Because there wasn't a single item or prop or article anywhere in the story that placed it. Not a one, and I actually started looking very early on. Like, within the first two or three pages. They're at a ball, and I realized not a single character's gown or coat or hat had been described, that not a single political reference had been made, nothing. I started flipping back, then forward, looking for something to set the time period, then I started reading with half my mind on the story and the other half scanning the text for something to tell me when it took place. Any note of the type of carriage, or the type of saddle used, or the way dresses were laced, or the style of shawl or the number of feathers in a goddamn hat. Not a single blooming thing.
The use of trains are a good example. The hero supposedly has his own private car, and that had me utterly baffled. Either it was terribly anachronistic, or the Regency time period covers a helluva lot bigger time than I was aware. For starters, technically the Regency is like 1810 to 1820, when England did have a Regent running things; I'm aware that some broaden this to stretch up to late 1830s, 1837 IIRC, when Queen Victoria took the throne. The problem with that is that the first train line that ran into London was, as far as I can tell, the London & Birmingham, which officially opened for business when, or shortly after, Victoria was crowned. That puts it out of the Regency era, so maybe the story was supposed to be non-Regency Regency? Hell if I know.
It ended up rendering the entire story really damn flat for me. It felt unhooked from its mooring, like it drifted aimlessly in a sort of never-never-land of faux aristocratic hauteur where everyone's so pressed about the details -- except that the author herself is just really coy about handing out those details. It felt like reading fanfiction, actually, when you don't know the fandom, and the author assumes you do, so just doesn't bother to mention any of a hundred things. It's just assumed you know this shit already, yo, and since (almost) everyone reading or agenting or editing also reads the same fandom, well, it'd never occur to them, either, that not everyone's going to walk into the story knowing ahead of time all the bothersome details about who's in parliament, or the latest scandal on the broadsheets, or even the line of a skirt or the height of a hem or whether the waistline rides high under the breasts or has settled down to more of a natural waist-level.
No wonder the book's cover had the heroine wearing a dress that looked like someone's second-hand version of a bad Ren Faire gown: there wasn't really a single clue in the book that could tie it down to a time period other than somewhere roughly between 1838, when steam train lines were opened to and becoming popular with the public, and around the 1930s, when Brit railways started experimenting with diesels.
I'm not asking for a specific day month and year, but bloody hell, an entire century of generalized looseness is just a bit much. Add in the wacky requirement that I suspend my disbelief such that the word of three people -- at least two of whom are either a) relatively upstanding members of society, b) at least members of an influential family, and c) MALE -- mean absolutely nothing compared to an adulterous, gambling-addicted, mistress. Riiiiiight.
And then tonight I finished another one I'd tracked down (on the basis of a review, I think, but now I can't recall where, though fortunately the book was pretty cheap thanks to discounts) -- and while this one scored major points for placing the story squarely in a time-period, it had a few trailing ends that weren't just left trailing, but felt like the author had started to go in one direction and then forgotten about that and never went back. But what really got me was the notion that for the heroine's luuurve to be okay, her paramour had to cast aside his claims of being a common man and reveal himself as a duke, or a marquis, or whatever-the-hell he is.
Here, all along, the author had been a) telling me the paramour had a pretty cozy life thanks to being highly successful at what he did, and b) emphasizing repeatedly the heroine's ease with this less-intense, less-class-based lifestyle, and even c) the heroine's own wish to be highly unconventional in having some kind of a business venture of her own, and to even d) evade marriage altogether if it meant being stuck in the house as baby-making machine. Hell, the author was even tossing around some pretty wild implications about just what artists get up to (though stopping short of handing anyone an opium pipe, but sheesh, the story and time period was begging for it).
Although I must admit as a somewhat casual lover of portraiture and art, I was rather confused at times as to just what the hero's artistic style was. The story's set in 1875, but the hero's style is alternately described in a way that made me think of Impressionism and then a different picture represented as Naturalism, and those styles are pretty opposite each other. Not to mention the pivotal work in the story sounds strongly Pre-Raphaelite, a style popular twenty-five years before the story was set -- even if William Morris was still going strong in 1875. Or the mention of Rushkin (the critic), who was already pretty unhinged by the early 1870s, so I have trouble going with the notion that his word still held water by 1875, let alone enough water to destroy a painter's career. Or the mention of the London underground, which was partially already built by 1875 but IIRC was entirely in private hands (and several different private hands at that), so I'm not sure why the House of Lords would be having anything to do with what was essentially several different companies development -- but the details were foggy, so again, only a mention but not enough to really show either research or lack thereof. Or the fact that a fellow artist's work is described in almost Expressionist terms, which is twenty-five years' early anachronism, ignoring that Expressionism was really a Continental/Germanic movement, and not a school of art normally associated with UK artists.
And then there were things that had me really tilting my head and squinting, like the heroine's admission that she'd like to see the Forbidden City. Okay. I'm willing to accept that the heroine would have absolutely no idea of China's strife following the Second Opium War (let alone its issues with Britain and British subjects), and willing to accept that the author is trying to tell me that the heroine dreams big. Until later in the story, when the heroine sees the hero's bed, and says it's Japanese, and then describes it... and that's Chinoiserie if I've ever heard it. I was left wondering whether I was supposed to conclude that the heroine is, in fact, utterly ignorant of anything about China (or Asia, in general) other than the romantic notion of 'The Forbidden City' so as to make such a blatant mix-up between two radically different bed-styles, especially seeing how Chinoiserie was so massively popular in the late Victorian era. I'd think the most likely assumption would be that the bed is Chinese, not Japanese, and ended up not sure whether it was the character's ignorance or the author's.
None of that necessarily detracted from the story itself, which was otherwise adequately entertaining to keep reading, but when I got to the end and we get the reveal that the hero is also from A Good Family and comes with handy title of his own... I dunno. I felt like I'd read this story one too many times: oh, noes, they can't marry because she's white and he's a native, until at the last minute you find out that he's not really native, he was just adopted, and like Mister Tarzan, he's spent time re-acculturating himself to be a Proper British Gentleman (which, yes, the painter/hero even does), and then he can marry her after all. The implication being that if he were, in fact, really native then of course he couldn't marry her -- or really a commoner, or really a black man, or really a whatever that's not titled rich white male gentry.
Maybe the story's written for people who like the notion of women dallying with those 'of a lower station,' but only if in the end the woman ends up marrying someone of her own class. Can it not be true love, otherwise? Even if as a working man, the hero is successful enough on his own terms to not need his landed gentry income at all? It doesn't miss me that in the stories where the woman is lower class than the man, this seems to be less of a problem -- I guess it's okay if a woman marries up, so long as she doesn't marry down. Maybe because the social status granted by her husband is the only social status she really has?
I know I've read historical-romance/fiction fans' comments that anything less would be ahistorical, but that's not necessarily true. There were love-matches, especially among artisans, who could reach much higher thanks to patronage. Not penny-common, but not four-leaf-clover rare, either. More to the point, I have major trouble believing some of those fans have the least bit of clue about what, exactly, is historically accurate and what's not, if the stories they laud as 'beautifully historical' are so completely lacking in details that I can't even pin down a general decade.
Shorter kaigou: whomever likes this genre is welcome to it, because that was more than enough for me. Cripes, these stories make Clavell look like an unparalleled linguistic genius, and that's saying something.