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 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.