Phew, faith restored in romance

The Perfect Rake came out in 2005 and I heard good things about it, but hadn't got round to picking up a copy until this year. It was a marvellous antidote to Private Arrangements, because although people did behave in a doo-lally way, it was consistent with the world of the novel and with their characters. Not a spock moment in sight, and as a bonus, some lovely secondary characters, notably the sweet Great-Uncle Oswald who conceals considerable shrewdness behind a dapper, frivolous front, and the slimy Phillip who is a terrifically unpleasant fiancé for the heroine to dispense with before she can enjoy True Leurv.

The dialogue was sparky and funny, the story rocketed along at a fair old pace and the motivations of characters were effectively drawn without being a seminar in Psych 101. On All About Romance, the reviewer was a little discomforted by the contrast between sunny romance and the darker situation of the heroine and her sisters who were initially at the mercy of their extremely brutal grandfather, but that didn't bother me as it gave rock solid reasons for the heroine's initial behaviour. And Gideon, our hero, is a terrific hero, and we are shown exactly how and why he loves Prudence. It was a pleasure to race through this one. But now, duty calls. Breakfast, tidying of boys' pits, dispensing with the remnants of the out of control forsythia that was triffiding up the garden, etc etc. Sigh. In the meantime, many thanks, Anne Gracie, for riding to the rescue of historical romance's reputation and coming up with a delightful frothy confection. I'm delighted to discover that I've got three sequels and the start of a new series by Gracie to catch up with. Huzzah.

Two terrific reads...and a stinker...

This was the first of two children's books that have been August highlights for me. Fly by Night features a brave heroine who makes mistakes and leads a very exciting life in a world that is influenced by Jonson and Pope - a world where books are dangerous and a printing press is a weapon as fearsome as a dirty bomb, and where heroes and villains are very hard to distinguish. It is clever, exciting and subtle. Frances Hardinge is writing a sequel, and I'll be queuing up to get it.

The second one is E.L. Konigsburg's The Mysterious Edge of the Heroic World, an unwieldy title for a very wieldy book. The story is complex, compelling and poignant. I loved Konigsburg's Mixed Up Files of Mrs Basil E Frankweiler when I first came upon it, but I think MEHW may be her masterpiece. It is a book for adults as well as children, as it deals with the Holocaust, and the fate of the old person no longer quite able to care for themselves as well as the nature of identity and friendship and all sorts of other rich notions. Konigsburg has a very engaging voice, a little remote and formal, very matter of fact and clear as well. It would go well with two other WW2 books for the YA market that also stand up to re-reading, Aidan Chambers' Postcards from No Man's Land and Mal Peet's Tamar. I would heartily recommend it.

And now for the stinker...

Private Arrangements by Sherry Thomas has received accolades aplenty from many review sites and blogs, and she, along with Joanna Bourne (Spymaster series), is being hailed as the next big thing/saviour of the historical romance. Which was what got me onto Amazon.

Sigh sigh sigh.

How do I hate this book, let me count the ways...

First of all, it made me feel like Spock. The emotional responses of these puny humans seemed to me entirely illogical, captain.

The main characters are called Camden and Gigi. Or hereafter, Crazed-for-sex and Gasping-for-humiliation. First of all, Crazed is totally in physical thrall to Gasping. But he is almost betrothed to another and he will not break his pledge. So Gasping forges a letter from Another saying that she was on the point of marrying Someone else. Crazed reads the letter, goes 'phew, now I can marry Gasping and shag her senseless'. BTW, I'm not kidding about the shagging. Sherry Thomas was clearly channelling Bridget Jones because the shag word comes up frequently. Too frequently. It's not an anachronism, but it isn't a word I associate with romance or the Belle Epoque era in which the book is set. Once she could have massaged past me, but repetition was jarring.

Back to the odd plot. Crazed discovers that the letter was forged, so he goes through with the wedding, has a rapturous shagathonic wedding night and then deserts her. This is the point at which she demonstrates her key characteristic, because she chases after him to Paris (where he is studying engineering at the Ecole Superieure) and keeps flinging herself in his path wearing little but scraps of lace. No hint that her behaviour raised any eyebrows. He resists her over and over and hires an actress to pose as his mistress because he is no longer quite so Crazed now that he's had his night of nookie.

Five years later, he sees her in Copenhagen. He's there with his current squeeze, but he catches a glimpse of her, she's on a boat and she goes all white-faced and Gaspy, and his heartstrings are tugged and he chases after her but only after buying the most vulgar ruby necklace he can find, which leaves her time to decamp so he heads back to New York where he has made his fortune. Oh, and btw, he, unbeknownst to her, despite her amazing financial acumen, has raised a whole load of loans using her name as security so that he can make as much money as she already has because heaven forfend that a woman have more financial clout than her husband. When Gasping discovers this chicanery, she's like, 'whatever'. If that had been me, I'd have had his testicles in a test-tube. And, if he wanted her back, why didn't he just go to London, where she lived and would sooner or later turn up and wait for her there? It's on the way between Copenhagen and NY, after all.

Ten years later, she finally gets round to demanding a divorce. So he comes back and says, I'll give you the divorce if you give me an heir. Spock alert spock alert.

Now, if he cooperated over the divorce business right away, he could get himself another hot mamma like Gasping and do the baby thing without further complications. And while we are talking post 1880s, surely Crazed and Gasping would have demonstrated quite a bit of complicity which courts did not look on kindly especially when deployed by divorcing couples.

Anyway, of course she accepts his weird conditions and they shag three times, and for various reasons which seem to have something to do with contraception, after the third time, he gives up and goes back to NY, and then sends her the ruby necklace (keep up, the one that meant he missed her when they were in Copenhagen) and demands that she return her engagement ring which was a modest sapphire number. So she takes this as an invitation, follows him to NY, turns up at a soiree in his home, insults his taste and then heads for his bed where he finds her starkers as soon as he'd got rid of all the guests. And they are reconciled.

So to start with, plot and characters are leaky, like the Titanic after that little brush with the iceberg.

Then there's the language. This was a rave point for reviewers, but here's a sample: "overhead, thick clouds hung like giant wads of soiled linen, gray with stains of pus yellow". There's a lot of that sort of description. I quite like a touch of pathetic fallacy, but this was like being clubbed by the Pathetic Fallacy ogre. Then a touch of historical background: "Perhaps the agricultural depression that had cut many a large estate's income by half had something to do with it. The aristocracy was in a pinch." Eh?

There's more, but basically, the language seemed to me at best unnoticeable, at worst, clunky and sometimes bizarre.

Theoretically, the book is set during the Belle Epoque, but apart from the occasional namechecking of Impressionist artists and Oscar Wilde, you'd hardly know it wasn't any old time when people wore long frou-frou skirts.

And finally, there's the structure, which is flashbacks and forwards and then interwoven here a fribble plot featuring Gasping's mother and the neighbouring duke who she'd always had a bit of a thing for. I skipped most of that because Crazed and Gasping were quite sufficient in terms of testing my limits of willing suspension of disbelief to utter destruction. But the to-and-fro structure highlighted that neither Crazed nor Gasping seemed to have matured remotely in the ten intervening years.

My absolutely final gripe with Sherry Thomas is this comment she made in a Q&A session: "England is always a good setting for a romance because, as a friend of mine once analyzed, England is an indubitably masculine place, which provides a perfect contrasting backdrop to a story about romantic love."

England - the masculine place where women like Boudicca and Margaret Thatcher, Elizabeth I and Elizabeth Fry, George Eliot and Jane Austen have scarcely impinged on the national consciousness at all...I'm not even touching that 'perfect contrasting backdrop' but the term backdrop tells you all you need to know about Thomas's grasp of English culture and history.

Anyway, I put the book down and felt as though I'd swallowed a mouthful of cobwebs. Luckily, this morning I picked up Anne Gracie's A Perfect Rake and about 70 pages in, am feeling 'phew, there are still good, fun, frothy romances out there.' I feel in safe hands. There's a strong flavour of Heyer's Frederica about a couple of the opening situations, which is promising given that Frederica is one of Heyer's best ever books.

A book to devour

It's sometime since I've been really satisfied by a novel, but here was an unexpected jewel that I picked up because it was on offer at a mass market bookseller at Dover's ferry docks. I hadn't previously heard of Bloom or the novel itself, but I will look out for more Bloom on the strength of Away.

While I was describing the story to a friend, I realised that most of my favourite books are about people making journeys and surviving in snowy wastes - This Thing of Darkness, Miss Smilla's Feeling For Snow, the People's Act of Love and The Tenderness of Wolves spring to mind. And in the classics, one of the books that has risen up my top five list in the last few years is Frankenstein, where once again the denouement takes place in the Arctic circle.

The journey of Lilian Leyb in Away is epic and dangerous in a multitude of ways, and although Lilian does at times seem a little opaque, the cast of supporting characters she meets are rich and varied and Bloom somehow skewers them very delicately. I heard a radio review of the novel by an academic at Georgetown University who trashed the book for being 'a pale Yiddish imitation of Toni Morrison's Beloved', full of stereotypical characters, but actually, I thought that was desperately unfair. I have read Beloved, which I have to say I liked a good deal less than Away, although it is many years since I read it, but actually, I didn't see that much in common between the books. There is something gloriously life-affirming in Away - Lilian has terrible, difficult experiences, but there is an unquenchable optimism to Bloom, and I also found Bloom's style much more accessible. It is very pared down, but when she uses imagery, it is sharp and clear and unforced. I actually thought of Austen although that may be because I am currently re-reading Pride and Prejudice. But Bloom has a delicate hand with irony and the book has some delicious set-pieces as well as a narrative flow that swept me along with some regret to the end.

And by the way, for those familiar with my evil end-reading habits, I gave only the briefest of glances at the end.... the journey there was too enthralling for me to head for the final section without having read the middle.

A sad week

Kate Mortimer has had some wonderful obituaries in The Guardian, The Independent and the Times this week, but this is how I will remember her, standing in her kitchen, at the hatch where she read her post, her papers and did the Times crossword as well as making tea and supervising her family, friends and pets. I first met Kate when I was five, but later she became my guardian when I was at boarding school, my godmother when I finally decided I needed to be christened at the grand age of 10, my landlady when my mother and I moved into her Hammersmith house, my boss, when I dipped a toe into the world of financial regulation and always, a funny, warm, generous and loving friend. Her funeral this week took place in the church for which she had raised tons of money for restoration, repair and maintenance, with a crowd of friends and family, on a ludicrously beautiful Devon day. She will be deeply missed.

And yesterday came the news that another fine, funny, warm and generous soul had died. After a long battle with pancreatic cancer, Randy Pausch, the computer scientist, has died.

There are plenty of platitudes that one can utter, but the basic truth is that death, particularly the premature death of people who have given so much and have so much more to offer, is miserable and unfair. But having known Kate and having known about Randy Pausch, both rigorous, ethical minds who shared their knowledge and their expertise for the benefit of their fellow humans, has been a privilege and the best that we who are left can do is try to live up to the standards that they have set - being brainy, and then working their brains hard, being decent, and then building on that with loyalty and generosity of spirit, exploring their dreams and helping others achieve their dreams.

And a quickie!!

Ooohhhooo, I'm on YouTube.

Last year, Daisy Godwin, a wonder-woman of British poetry, made a three part series on Romance called Reader, I Married Him, and I am an interviewee. Feels so weird. Made minion number one really embarrassed. Hee hee, the joys of motherhood.

Over at Youtube you can find:

Happily Ever After - Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6

Heroes - Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9

Heroines - Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6

It is so painful seeing myself on TV - and the voice. Eek, do I really sound like that!