I haven't read any Gentle since "1610". I'm still fond of the Valentine books, though. My knowledge of history's not good enough to get the erasure.
(Continued from previous comment, because character limit.)
Also, there is an entire detour of the plot where Ilario falls in love with an Etruscan woman in Rome, courts her, marries her, and then it all falls apart because Ilario can tolerate her being socially outcast, physically disabled (though beautiful; she has a clubfoot), and slightly magical (the clubfoot is seen in its true aspect as a goat's hoof within her family's sacred grove), but Sulva's reaction to Ilario's hermaphrodite nature is to throw a fit and then throw Ilario out of the house, nastily and with modern transphobic langugage, ordering Ilario to stay away for the seven years it will take the city to declare them legally dead and then she can marry someone "normal." Because it turns out that's all she wants. Someone to normalize her. Not to treasure her for being Etruscan, or strangely beautiful, or partly descended from fauns, but someone to hide her from all these things and assimilate her into mainstream society, which a half-woman husband will never be able to. At which I point I almost threw the book across the room. Not only does this conclusion turn the episode into a digression—it is the entire upshot of the interlude in Rome; nothing has changed about Ilario's life, except for an inconvenient marriage license which now needs time-in-exile to expire—it leaves the reinforcement that men come in all flavors, but women are emotionally volatile, basically hypocritical, and self-limiting. Sulva does not come away with Ilario when given the opportunity, despite the lacerating fight they have just had. She stays in her cage.
For the record, Ty-amenhotep of Alexandria is cis and she's awesome: she is physically tiny, fiercely intelligent, a canny ruler and mother of three children. But she is, explicitly, not very feminine by the standards of even her egalitarian culture or our own. In the end the book left me feeling that it couldn't be queer-positive without being misogynist and I really, really didn't like that.
Also, Rekhmire' was the obvious romantic match with Ilario from his first appearance and I think it would have been a hell of a lot more interesting if the match with Sulva had worked out and everybody had had to factor that into their feelings.
I talked a little about Ilario and the erasure of Jews here: basically, all the anti-Semitic slurs and the problems of assimilation, prejudice, and/or passing with which a Jewish family in our early fourteenth-century Rome would have been expected to contend are transposed onto the Etruscan family of Sulva Paziathe; Jews might as well not exist in Ilario despite their known presence in Ash only a generation later. It is weird and struck me as weird on first reading and is weirder every time I try picking up the novel again. The Etruscans are awesome and I want more representation of them. Mary Gentle seems only to be able to conceive of one underrepresented axis at a time. Genderqueer characters, women under the bus. Persecuted Etruscans in the world of the Green Christ, goodbye Jews.
[edit] OH RIGHT INCREDIBLY PROBLEMATIC REPRESENTATION OF TRANS FEMALE CHARACTER HOW COULD I FORGET. I mean, I think it is trying. But I do not consider it all right for other characters to use Neferet's male birth name as a rebuke to her and for Ilario's observations to keep focusing on the male tells of her physique as contrasted to her feminine dress and movement, as though what is most important about her is that she does not pass entirely.
no subject
(Continued from previous comment, because character limit.)
Also, there is an entire detour of the plot where Ilario falls in love with an Etruscan woman in Rome, courts her, marries her, and then it all falls apart because Ilario can tolerate her being socially outcast, physically disabled (though beautiful; she has a clubfoot), and slightly magical (the clubfoot is seen in its true aspect as a goat's hoof within her family's sacred grove), but Sulva's reaction to Ilario's hermaphrodite nature is to throw a fit and then throw Ilario out of the house, nastily and with modern transphobic langugage, ordering Ilario to stay away for the seven years it will take the city to declare them legally dead and then she can marry someone "normal." Because it turns out that's all she wants. Someone to normalize her. Not to treasure her for being Etruscan, or strangely beautiful, or partly descended from fauns, but someone to hide her from all these things and assimilate her into mainstream society, which a half-woman husband will never be able to. At which I point I almost threw the book across the room. Not only does this conclusion turn the episode into a digression—it is the entire upshot of the interlude in Rome; nothing has changed about Ilario's life, except for an inconvenient marriage license which now needs time-in-exile to expire—it leaves the reinforcement that men come in all flavors, but women are emotionally volatile, basically hypocritical, and self-limiting. Sulva does not come away with Ilario when given the opportunity, despite the lacerating fight they have just had. She stays in her cage.
For the record, Ty-amenhotep of Alexandria is cis and she's awesome: she is physically tiny, fiercely intelligent, a canny ruler and mother of three children. But she is, explicitly, not very feminine by the standards of even her egalitarian culture or our own. In the end the book left me feeling that it couldn't be queer-positive without being misogynist and I really, really didn't like that.
Also, Rekhmire' was the obvious romantic match with Ilario from his first appearance and I think it would have been a hell of a lot more interesting if the match with Sulva had worked out and everybody had had to factor that into their feelings.
I talked a little about Ilario and the erasure of Jews here: basically, all the anti-Semitic slurs and the problems of assimilation, prejudice, and/or passing with which a Jewish family in our early fourteenth-century Rome would have been expected to contend are transposed onto the Etruscan family of Sulva Paziathe; Jews might as well not exist in Ilario despite their known presence in Ash only a generation later. It is weird and struck me as weird on first reading and is weirder every time I try picking up the novel again. The Etruscans are awesome and I want more representation of them. Mary Gentle seems only to be able to conceive of one underrepresented axis at a time. Genderqueer characters, women under the bus. Persecuted Etruscans in the world of the Green Christ, goodbye Jews.
[edit] OH RIGHT INCREDIBLY PROBLEMATIC REPRESENTATION OF TRANS FEMALE CHARACTER HOW COULD I FORGET. I mean, I think it is trying. But I do not consider it all right for other characters to use Neferet's male birth name as a rebuke to her and for Ilario's observations to keep focusing on the male tells of her physique as contrasted to her feminine dress and movement, as though what is most important about her is that she does not pass entirely.