The blood of his friends was gone beneath snow

[sovay]

In recent years, I feel we have been promised many blizzards, snowpocalypses, and Fimbulvetrs that never quite made the grade: blew out to sea, slumped off into freezing rain, deposited an entirely normal amount of snow for a New England winter storm and moved on with their lives. Especially as the forecasts and warnings threw around (admittedly delightful) meteorological buzzwords like "bombogenesis," I was prepared for snow, but not lots of it.

It was snowing last night as we watched Here We Go Again (1942). It was snowing last night as we watched Zazie dans le métro (1960). It was snowing last night as we went to bed and I read Josephine Tey's The Franchise Affair (1948). Sometimes it was snowing vertically. It looked very impressive, sleeting sideways by in the sodium streetlight. It was snowing when we woke up.

This isn't the second coming of the Blizzard of '78, but there's a respectable two feet of snow in the drifts down there and I foresee lots of shoveling in my future. I can live with that.

Comments

[sovay]

(I hate The Franchise Affair with a passion. When you-all are done reading it, I could tell you why, if that would be of any interest.)

Well, since you're here and lnhammer doesn't have to read my comments unless he wants to—

So my background with Josephine Tey is that basically I like her. I imprinted early on The Daughter of Time and it still holds up for me; I am incredibly fond of To Love and Be Wise; I bounced so badly off Miss Pym Disposes that I never finished it and I couldn't get into Brat Farrar. I have read some of the other Inspector Grant novels and enjoyed them, although there's at least one where the obligatory background racism bit me much more badly than I was expecting. One of the nice touches about The Franchise Affair is the way Inspector Grant effectively cameos as an antagonist, since as an officer of the law he is required to take the side of the girl who filed the complaint of kidnapping and assault and Robert Blair as the protagonist and a partisan of Marion Sharpe is required not to agree with him.

My problem with the novel so far is that it's not even-handed. It's set up like a classic double-blind: a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl known for her reticence and her honesty accuses two reclusive women of a grotesque crime, abducting her, abusing her, attempting to force her into domestic slavery; the solicitor called in on the case doesn't believe a word of it and takes against the girl almost immediately, but he also took to the accused at once, so how reliable does that make him? The police take the charge seriously, the papers take it up as a cause célèbre, Blair is working against popular opinion—and the girl's own apparently ironclad eyewitness—in wanting to defend Marion Sharpe and her witchy mother at all. And then the book undercuts its own ambiguity almost at once. Blair distrusts Betty Kane and her candid, childlike absolute ordinariness; fine, he has emotional reasons to. The novel has no good reasons for distrusting her to the same degree. So far, everything Blair has been able to discover about her only confirms his initial uneasy dislike. She is supplied with no redeeming characteristics; her intelligence is slyness, her self-possession is self-indulgence, the color and the setting of her eyes are those of a promiscuous liar. Even her history, which is objectively pathetic—a child evacuee with a neglectful birth mother and an adoring adoptive brother who outgrew her as soon as he fell in love—is used to write her off as just another slum-bred slut. At the point where I left off reading, if Blair's suspicions are right, Betty Kane has done/is doing something reprehensible: she ran away from home on a romantic adventure and is willing to send two innocent strangers to prison to cover her tracks. And he's quite right that she shouldn't be allowed to get away with it. But I don't think the novel should be allowed to get away with the amount of vitriol it expends on a bored, clever, sexually experienced adolescent. I have lost track of the number of supposedly sympathetic characters who have expressd a desire to hurt Betty Kane, physically—beat her, flay her, torture her for what she's done, as if she's a witch or a monster. As if she barely deserves to escape with her life for lying about the shabby-gentry Sharpes (I quite like Marion Sharpe! She's a great character! I'm hoping she and Robert don't actually end up together!) instead of taking the slut-shaming she had coming to her when her adventure went awry. Unless we're leading to some violent upset of narrative opinion, it's going to leave a bad taste in my mouth.

Should I assume from your comment that the violent upset does not occur, or do you hate it for some completely different reason?

[desperance.livejournal.com]

I would dearly have loved to have hated it for some completely different reason.

You need expect no violent upset in the narrative drive. Professionally, I scorn the book because it set up a situation where either Betty Kane is lying, or else Marion Sharpe and her mother are lying; the only interesting way to resolve this is to twist the narrative orthogonally, such that it turns out that they are both telling the truth from their limited perspectives, and the actuality is something else altogether. That would've been fun. It's not what happens. And the sympathies of the novel, the characters, the author and presumably the intended reader all lie one way from page one, with the nice accused middle-class ladies rather than the slutty common servant girl; and - does this still count as a spoiler? - what they all believe is indeed what turns out to have happened; the whole damn book is an exercise in pure unadulterated snobbery, and I detest it.

And I really resent that, because I wholly bought into The Daughter of Time and I deeply liked Brat Farrar (despite having been entirely unsurprised by the supposed dramatic twist, which just seemed inevitable from very early on: if Brat was to remain sympathetic to the reader, the heir he was conning out of a fortune must turn out to be a villain, and there's only one obvious villainy waiting to be uncovered). Brat Farrar makes a happy pair in my head with Mary Stewart's The Ivy Tree, the same theme with a very different reality beneath it; and my own unwritten Human Engines makes a third, by very properly seizing the third alternative. Person turns up claiming to be long-lost heir: are they lying, or are they telling the truth, or - ? That "or" is where I really, really wanted The Franchise Affair to go, and it never takes a step in that direction. It's lazy, along with all its other offences. Bah humbug, say I.

[sovay]

I would dearly have loved to have hated it for some completely different reason.

Dammit!

Brat Farrar makes a happy pair in my head with Mary Stewart's The Ivy Tree, the same theme with a very different reality beneath it

I'll give it another try, then; I like The Ivy Tree. Is your Human Engines going to be written someday?

are they lying, or are they telling the truth, or - ? That "or" is where I really, really wanted The Franchise Affair to go, and it never takes a step in that direction.

Because I didn't want the Sharpes to turn out to be villains, either, I was hoping for last-minute "or." Not very confidently at this point, but still. One of the reasons I love To Love and Be Wise is that it pulls out a third-alternative finale which is neither supernatural nor a disappointment.

I will finish The Franchise Affair, but I will be sad.

[edit] Finished. I still hope Marion ditches him in Canada.

[larryhammer]

Sounds like I can reliably press "delete" on it.

Thanks, both.

---L.

[sovay]

Thanks, both.

You're welcome. I am taking comfort from the fact that the exact same problem inspired Sarah Waters to write a novel of her own. (Her analysis of the book's social context is also helpful to me, since the demonizing of Betty Kane is otherwise so outrageous as to feel nearly inexplicable; it put me permanently out of sympathy with the protagonist early on.)

The last twenty-four hours have been a very mixed bag for media. Zazie dans le métro was splendid; I'd seen it and loved it in 2011, I was just talking about it with derspatchel, and there it was streaming on TCM. He'd never seen it before and he loved it. Here We Go Again was seventy-five percent a charming episode of Fibber McGee and Molly on film and then the secondary plot with Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy rose from the depths and ate the movie. I am not complaining because I dislike, on principle, Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy,* but if Bergen was the one who decided to include the ethnic humor with the reservation full of Native Americans and himself in redface drag, then I believe I'm within my rights to dislike him for that. The movie never recovered. Which was a shame, because Jim and Marian Jordan are fine on film. I'm pinning a lot of hope on anything I watch or read tonight not being full of unexpected aaagh no.

* Having a ventriloquist's dummy occasionally portrayed by a kid with a mask on, however, is just the wrong side of the uncanny valley. I never knew I needed to be grateful to Jim Henson for finding a way for puppets to walk around without being creepy.

[larryhammer]

I'm pinning a lot of hope on anything I watch or read tonight not being full of unexpected aaagh no.

Indeed.

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

I thought even The Little Stranger was a bit on the snobby side (e.g., the utter impossibility of moving to a smaller house), though nothing like as bad as Tey.

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

Oh, and I remember the bit about eye color indicating character, because I read it when I was just young enough to worry about whether I should be taking that kind of thing seriously. But then I realized that in Tey it's blue (well, a particular shade of blue) and in Georgette Heyer it's brown eyes that you can't trust.

[sovay]

because I read it when I was just young enough to worry about whether I should be taking that kind of thing seriously. But then I realized that in Tey it's blue (well, a particular shade of blue) and in Georgette Heyer it's brown eyes that you can't trust.

It isn't even that I worry about believing different authors' ideas of physiognomy—it's just one of those fallbacks that, when presented as objective fact, cause me to distrust a narrative. I can overlook it in The Daughter of Time because there the "nice face" isn't a real piece of proof, but the apparent contradiction with the legend that causes Grant to start researching, after which the historical facts take over his impression of Richard III, with the painted face remaining as a kind of tutelary spirit over his investigations. The Franchise Affair seems to take the wide-set slate-blue eyes as infallible and damning and it just doesn't work for me.

[sovay]

I thought even The Little Stranger was a bit on the snobby side (e.g., the utter impossibility of moving to a smaller house), though nothing like as bad as Tey.

Noted. My experience of Sarah Waters is The Night Watch, which I liked very much, although I can't tell if I should have found it more or less depressing than I did.