But—will you e'er forget the scent of hawthorn in the sun, or bracken in the wet?

[sovay]

D. K. Broster's The Flight of the Heron (1925) is indeed a more complex novel than The Wounded Name (1922) and almost as damn-the-subtext slashy—it's not difficult to see one as a dry run for the other, although they differ substantially in the ending and I am not getting over the incredibly gay string of classical allusions in the earlier novel any time soon. This one piles on not just the loyalty and the hurt/comfort but the conflicted pursuit of honor between heart and duty in ways that occasionally and unexpectedly gave me flashbacks to some elements of Turn (2014–2017). The latter were not unwelcome, but I don't consider them statistically significant; they may be a side effect of emotionally twisty narratives set between rebellion and empire. Conversely, I am indebted to nineweaving for confirming the lineage between Broster and Rosemary Sutcliff with the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, since after one novel of Broster's I was suspicious, but after two I was willing to buy a hat to eat if Sutcliff hadn't read her. I have found myself saying recently that Broster feels like a bright body in a constellation of writers I was raised on, but it took me until now to see her. I feel like I could end up with a research project on my hands if I'm not careful.

It was strange, it was alarming, to feel, as by this time he did, how strongly their intimacy had progressed in two months of absence and, on his side, of deliberate abstention from communication—like the roots of two trees growing secretly towards each other in darkness.

(Slash goggles continue to be superfluous.)

Comments

[sovay]

Oh, cool. Thanks for the offer!

I trained as a classicist. I try to use my powers for good.

(in fact for Yuletide this year I wrote a crossover between a Mitchison book and a Townsend Warner book)

AAAAAAAAAAH.

But I've never read Jill Paton Walsh, so thanks for the rec!

You're welcome! She was a prolific author of contemporary and historical fiction in multiple periods and turned out to have written a pair of formative picture books from my childhood; I gravitated mostly toward her classical work, but everything I have read of hers—aside from the Sayers continuations, of which I found the first an interesting experiment and noped hard out of the second and the rest—has been well-done and worthwhile. Skip A Parcel of Patterns (1983) if you are not feeling up for a retelling of the self-quarantine of Eyam during the Great Plague of London in 1665, though.

[kindkit]

I think I need to read the Patton Walsh book. I've never read anything by her, purely out of dislike for the idea of the Wimsey continuations. But your review makes Farewell, Great King sound like my kind of thing, and I've recently finished a re-read of all the Renaults I want to re-read.

[sovay]

But your review makes Farewell, Great King sound like my kind of thing, and I've recently finished a re-read of all the Renaults I want to re-read.

I loved it when I read it, and in ten years I've still never seen it in a used book store. I hope you can find it readily and enjoy!

(I understand the experiment of completing Thrones, Dominations, since Sayers had at least left the ending of that one, but I wouldn't have tapped Paton Walsh for it and I wouldn't have gone on afterward. She should be better known for everything else.)