Where have you been for so long?

[sovay]

I am reading Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone (1868). It's not quite the first time—I read it once in high school, but remembered mostly that I really liked it. I still really like it. If it's the first detective novel, it's a great way to start a genre. I have not quite finished the book, but I have gotten far enough into the final act to meet Ezra Jennings:

The door opened, and there entered to us, quietly, the most remarkable-looking man that I had ever seen. Judging him by his figure and his movements, he was still young. Judging him by his face, and comparing him with Betteredge, he looked the elder of the two. His complexion was of a gipsy darkness; his fleshless cheeks had fallen into deep hollows, over which the bone projected like a pent-house. His nose presented the fine shape and modelling so often found among the ancient people of the East, so seldom visible among the newer races of the West. His forehead rose high and straight from the brow. His marks and wrinkles were innumerable. From this strange face, eyes, stranger still, of the softest brown—eyes dreamy and mournful, and deeply sunk in their orbits—looked out at you, and (in my case, at least) took your attention captive at their will. Add to this a quantity of thick closely-curling hair which by some freak of Nature had lost its colour in the most startlingly partial and capricious manner. Over the top of his head it was still of the deep black which was its natural colour. Round the sides of his head—without the slightest gradation of grey to break the force of the extraordinary contrast—it had turned completely white. The line between the two colours preserved no sort of regularity. At one place, the white hair ran up into the black; at another, the black hair ran down into the white. I looked at the man with a curiosity which, I am ashamed to say, I found it quite impossible to control. His soft brown eyes looked back at me gently; and he met my involuntary rudeness in staring at him with an apology which I was conscious that I had not deserved.

He's the former family doctor's distrusted assistant, half-English, with a tragic backstory and a disreputable character; he says of himself that "Physiology says, and says truly, that some men are born with female constitutions—and I am one of them!" Some pages after that we discover that he also has a terminal illness and an opium addiction. And a heart of gold, but that went without saying from those eyes.

I feel . . . attacked?

Comments

[thisbluespirit]

It was astonishing to me how many tropes it appeared to anticipate, meaning only that it really created them. Plus it was better on women and what I would call postcolonialism if it weren't the actual height of the British Empire than many, many, many of its successors.

Indeed! (I once had to write an essay on something like that, but I have forgotten every word of it since. I really wanted to write something else, but it was one of those chosen essay things and I was never good at working out what I wanted to write, so always ended up doing something the teacher wanted me to write.)

I also think, now that I've read Dracula, that The Woman in White must surely have been an influence, but I have read a lot less on sensation, gothic and horror fiction, so I don't know if people have commented on that.

Was that Dan Simmons' Drood (2009)? If so, totally don't forgive Dan Simmons.

Yes! I am indeed never forgiving Dan Simmons. It was one of those books where I wasn't even glad I read it; my life would have been better if I hadn't!

[moon_custafer]

I also think, now that I've read Dracula, that The Woman in White must surely have been an influence,

Because of the multiple-narrator found-footage kind of feel?

[thisbluespirit]

Well, that, yes, and Laura and Marian/Lucy and Mina, villainous Counts, mesmerism, and asylums. I mean, they do quite different things with it, but it was one of the first things I thought of.