Takes more than charm if you're going to get me to confess

[sovay]

So I'm reading a thread about Josephine Tey over at skygiants' where people are anti-recommending Miss Pym Disposes (1946) and The Franchise Affair (1948) and I don't disagree with them in either case—I've read the latter and everyone who has ever mentioned the former to me included the caution that it can turn you off Tey for life. It interests me that this happens with authors, the one or two books out of an otherwise enjoyable body of work that need warning against/exorcism with fire and salt. In the case of The Franchise Affair, it seems fairly clear that the unexamined classism which runs in an undercurrent through all of Tey's work simply rose from the depths and ate the premise alive. That model does not explain Margery Allingham's The Fashion in Shrouds (1938), since unexamined misogyny does not otherwise afflict the other eighteen Campion novels (but in order to figure out the cause I'd have to re-read the book, so I haven't yet). I recognize that the phenomenon is idiosyncratic—I finally bounced off a novel by Mary Stewart when I read Wildfire at Midnight (1956) because its mystery is perfectly well-constructed but its romance depends on reconciliation between two people who had really good reasons to be divorced. I'm not really asking for a list of books to avoid, but I'm curious about other people's experiences with the outliers that suddenly bit them. Is it usually the case that a regrettable but generally background tendency comes to the fore because of specific plot conditions and there goes the neighborhood? Is it just that the brain-eater stopped by for a midnight snack and left by the next book in the series? Do you have no idea what happened, but for God's sake don't read that one anyway? Inquiring minds! And then, so as not to be totally down on literature, this literary mixtape is pretty awesome.

Comments

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

I grew up on Rebecca West's The Fountain Overflows, and am very fond of parts of the posthumously published sequels, This Real Night and Cousin Rosamund, but the third takes a particularly nasty left turn that I don't understand at all.

[sovay]

I grew up on Rebecca West's The Fountain Overflows, and am very fond of parts of the posthumously published sequels, This Real Night and Cousin Rosamund, but the third takes a particularly nasty left turn that I don't understand at all.

I don't think I know Rebecca West at all. What happens with the books?

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

Well, that is a very tall order. Here is a very good (but very spoilerish) description of the first book (though I disagree about West always being kind): http://cavigliascabinetofcuriosities.blogspot.com/2011/05/rebecca-west-fountain-overflows.html

I read that at twelve or so (my mother and oldest sister suddenly realizing that I was old enough to appreciate the book and pressing it on me), and the sequels came out after I was grown up, so both they and I seemed to be somehow in a different world.

Cousin Rosamund, the very unfinished third volume, has people behaving really horribly, over and over -- one character says "Think of those bloody people, remember how bloody they were, call them what Othello did. 'Goats and monkeys! Goats and monkeys!' " And there's a lot of condescending rot about gay people, probably period-appropriate but not fun to read anyway. And the thing no one can understand, either within the book or without, is the marriage of Cousin Rosamund (who is as near a saint as you get in Rebecca West) to a horrible man whom she obviously doesn't love.

West had some plan for the whole thing where Rosamund was supposed to emerge as a central figure in a saga of the first half of the twentieth century, and I don't think that works at all with the kind of novel The Fountain Overflows had already succeeded in being, if you see what I mean.

[sovay]

Here is a very good (but very spoilerish) description of the first book (though I disagree about West always being kind)

That sounds fantastic. I can see being really disoriented by the later two books, especially since Cousin Rosamund sounds actually bad.

West had some plan for the whole thing where Rosamund was supposed to emerge as a central figure in a saga of the first half of the twentieth century, and I don't think that works at all with the kind of novel The Fountain Overflows had already succeeded in being, if you see what I mean.

The Fountain Overflows sounds very much like a book that doesn't need a sequel. I will have to read it and ignore the rest.

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

I do like almost all of This Real Night (the second one), though, and there are bits in the third one I'm glad to have. But yeah, if I had never known about the sequels I wouldn't necessarily have missed them.

[moon-custafer.livejournal.com]

...to a horrible man whom she obviously doesn't love

There's a not-bad Campion fanfic (The Wicked Wedding) that begins with a scenario like that...

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

I had read that! It was fun.