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

[sovay]

Why should the couple get divorced in Wildfire at Midnight?

They are divorced when the story begins. The reasons make very good sense to me—they married after knowing one another for three months, in 1945 when she was a nineteen-year-old model making a sensational debut and he was a rising young author ten years her senior and neither of them had any real idea of the person they were falling in love with. "What he had meant to marry was a modern-day Gianetta Fox, a composed young sophisticate who would hold her own in the fast-moving society to which he was accustomed; what he'd actually got was only Gianetta Brooke, not long out of school, whose poise was a technique very recently acquired in Montefior's salons and the Mayfair mannequin factory . . . The times were out of joint for us, the gap too wide—not the ten years' gap between our ages, rather, the thousand-year-old stretch of a world war that to me was only an adolescent memory hardly denting the surface of my life, but to Nicholas was a still-recurring nightmare agony leaving scars on the mind which were then only precariously skinning over. How was I, untouched nineteen, to apprehend the sort of stresses that drove Nicholas? And how was he to guess that, deep down under my precarious self-confidence, lurked the destroying germs of insecurity and fear?" He has affairs, they have fights, the relationship devolves into one of those emotionally brutal who-loves-least-wins competitions, and after three years they break up. Four years after that the narrator takes a holiday and runs into Nicholas among the guests at a remote Scottish hotel who shortly become the suspects in a series of weird murders and red herrings. I'm not sure it's one of Stewart's best novels no matter what—which is a shame, because the plot turns out to involve pagan human sacrifce—but my real problem was the plot insisting on reconciliation and remarriage between Nicholas and Gianetta without taking the time to demonstrate that they have either repaired their relationship or rebuilt it from scratch in a way that won't cause the same problems a year or so down the line. The narrator explicitly mentions that being around Nicholas causes her to fall into the old familiar patterns of their marriage, patterns which were expressly terrible for both of them. We don't see either of them figuring out how to break the mold. I'd have been fine with an ending that saw them as friends, having each figured out how to like and trust the other person without replicating the old hurtful behaviors. Instead we are somehow meant to believe that everything will be different and wonderful just because they've been through a murder case together and I couldn't. It was the first time I'd left a Stewart novel actively hoping against the romance. It was a little demoralizing.

By the way, I just heard from the lugubrious Garrison Keillor over at The Writer's Almanac that it's Wittgenstein's birthday.

So it is! I should do something with language.

If you feel anything settling on your shoulder, brush it off.

Thank you.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

The narrator explicitly mentions that being around Nicholas causes her to fall into the old familiar patterns of their marriage, patterns which were expressly terrible for both of them. We don't see either of them figuring out how to break the mold.

That does not sound like a recipe for success, no.

[sovay]

That does not sound like a recipe for success, no.

Right! Fortunately it was Stewart's second novel and she never repeated its romantic pattern, but you see why it doesn't work for me!