Lucinda Elliot's Blog, page 12
October 11, 2019
Purple Prose and a Rapist ‘hero’: The Original Bodice Ripper: Review of ‘The Flame and the Flower’ by Kathleen E. Woodiwiss
Marty-Stu rapes Mary-Sue and then they find a love so true…
I am so glad that I have finished this (by the way, I read it for research: honestly!). I detested reading it; and it was epic length. The only reason I am not giving it one star is because an online friend of mine said that it had helped her in dealing with memories of sexual abuse.
It has been argued that the whole ‘rape to love’ theme so beloved of the Bodice Rippers of the 1970’s developed from the fact that the US was many decades behind the UK and parts of Europe in accepting a woman’s right to sexual pleasure; this being so, readers of this age group were attracted by the comforting fantasy of a man who is at first a sexual aggressor coming to love and treat the object of his lust with tenderness and respect.
This being so, I will give it two stars. This is the most acid review that I have written about any book. As I have often said, I don’t like giving low star, savage reviews and only award them for novels which romanticise rapist so-called heroes or the brutalisation of women.
Even so,being a softy, I doubt I would have been able to bring myself to write it, had the author still been alive.
This story seems to be a verison of Georgette Heyer’s ‘Devil’s Cub’ meets Margaret Mitchell’s ‘Gone with the Wind’.
From ‘Devil’s Cub’ there is the abduction on a ship by a seemingly wicked man who misunderstands the female lead’s purpose and mistakes her for ‘a light woman’, the male lead making a rape attempt (in this case, after earlier successful ones) with the words: ‘Be damned, I’ll take you’ , the male lead’s murderously violent temper, his showing unexpected kindness to the female lead when she is seasick, etc.
Birmingham is also as a sea captain from Charleston, like Rhett Butler from ‘Gone With the Wind’, though Rhett Butler has the ability to laugh at himself that this ‘hero’ does not, and is far likable and intelligent generally. Birmingham’s late mother and the female lead are obviously based upon Scarlett O’Hara’s mother Ellen; the countless other similarities include a version of the sharp-tongued Grandma Fontaine, who in this case becomes one of a chorus devoted to singing the female lead’s praises and running down other women.
I have to find some positive things to say about this. I suppose the writing can be described as vivid; in some passages, it is even striking if overburdened with adjectives and adverbs. For instance, this description of a storm: –
‘Horse and rider entered a forest gone wild. Once lazy branches lashed and stung and whipped and clawed. The trees bent and swayed in what seemed a frenzied determination to snatch her from the horse and failing, moaned their frustration to the wind.’
In its day, it was a phenomenal success.
Views about rapist ‘heroes’ have changed, and I am frankly disturbed that it still receives glowing reviews.
On the writing style, unfortunately, this is far more typical:–
‘To her he appeared as some splendid, godlike being. Murmuring her love to him, she slid her arms about his neck, pressing her soft breasts into the mat of hair that covered his chest …’
For someone who is supposed to be devout, the female lead doesn’t seem very troubled by the First Commandment. Elizabeth Gaskell would have pointed the moral to that.
Purpose prose abounds. Such tautologies as ‘He laughed at her with mirth, throwing his splendid head up high’ are typical. I felt that if I read once more about her, ‘looking up at him timidly’ or the muscle in his jaw ‘twitching spasmodically in his anger’, or ‘the elderly ******* grinning from ear to ear’ I would turn into a dung beetle. Sometimes, the ‘hero’s’ eyes are like ‘flames of fire’ or ‘burning with passion’s fire’. At other times, he ‘chuckles softly’. He is very fond of doing that.
I lost count of the number of times the allure of these ‘soft breasts’ is mentioned, or of descriptions of Heather’s ‘ flowing dark tresses’, or her other charms. Possibly more often than we hear about his ‘dark, handsome face’.
There is no man who meets Heather who doesn’t fall for her, and all the women long for Brandon Birmingham, which surely qualifies the pair as fully paid up, card-holding members of the Mary-Sue and Marty-Stu club .
All men are seized by violent desire the minute they set eyes on Heather. Fat, repulsive ones are stimulated to unusual athleticism in trying to rape her, and as a result are thrown out of windows or knocked flying into bushes by the male lead.
Interestingly, fat people in this are invariably evil, with the exception of Hatti , rightly described in a Goodreads review as a ‘Cringeworthy Mammy stereotype.’
Here
And after all, she is merely, ‘ample’. She is the black domestic tyrant slave wholly devoted to the interests of her white owners. A typical speech from her is: – ‘Oh Lordy, Master Bran, we done thought something bad had happened to you.’
Interestingly, by contrast, none of the black men in this are given any personality or indeed, any sort of distinguishing personal characteristics at all.
At least, the racism of Margaret Mitchell in ‘Gone With The Wind’ had the excuse that was published in 1936, and begun ten years earlier. This novel was published in 1972, long after the Civil Rights movement. Yes, of course there was slavery in the US of 1799; but should it have been portrayed wholly uncritically?
Everyone regards the ‘hero’ with admiration, even those who suspect the rape, though a couple express misgivings over it . All the single local women swoon over this fellow. In fact, his jilted former fiancée continues to pursue him shamelessly. Just why everyone admires him, when he is depicted as being as callow and insensitive as a boy of fourteen at the age of thirty-five or six, isn’t explained, except by his being handsome and rich and something of a bully. Neither does he have the excuse of having lost his mother early; she died when he was twenty-five.
[image error]
*Warning: spoilers follow*
This fiancée is understandably humiliated when the ‘hero’ turns up with a bride at the port where she comes to greet him back to the US. Here, one wonders at his total lack of social graces. Even given that overseas post would be disrupted by the French Revolutionary Wars, he might have had the sense to send one of his men with a note ahead of him before coming ashore, asking his brother to get his former fiancée out of the way. No, such delicacy is beyond him, and all of a piece with his performance as a rapist.
This rejected fiancée makes a point of aiming cruel barbs at the poor, helpless Heather (her late nineteenth century name being one anachronism among many concerning the late eighteenth century UK).
This woman, Louisa, is referred to as a ‘blonde bitch’ (off topic: as one born with light coloured hair, I find the way two terms are commonly casually linked in light novels to be wholly unfair).Strangely enough, the ludicrously named ‘Brandon Birmingham’ -it may be that the author had never taken note of what an unromantic city the Birmingham in England is- though he is portrayed as a macho man, shows a feminine streak of spite in his replies to these taunts.
For instance, this exchange, when the ‘hero’ is seen by his ex- fiancée carrying the now heavily pregnant Heather upstairs, is typical:
‘”Do you do this every night, Brandon?” she enquired jeeringly, with a raised eyebrow. “It surely must put a strain upon your back, darling…’
‘His face was expressionless as he made his reply, “I’ve lifted heavier women in my life, including you…’
Louisa keeps walking into these put-downs as if she can’t see them coming, though she is supposed to be so socially confident. In fact, she is, like most of the characters, wholly unbelievable.
Credible characters can make a wholly incredible plot seem believable, but these are as unreal as the events in the story. These characters are caricatures.
Though the story begins in England, the author shows a remarkably blasé attitude towards the need for any familiarity with the topography, language or customs of the UK of the late eighteenth century.
In fact, the action begins in ‘the English countryside’, with no county specified. The description is apparantly much admired, and is certainly striking, but it is set in a geographically impossible location of moorland which is nevertheless within a day’s journey of London on the appalling roads of 1799. Also, here, there is apparently a climate so dry that on a hot summer’s day dust hangs continually in the air. Even when roads were only partly paved, there could be no place in England, even in a prolonged drought, dry and hot enough to create that effect.
These anachronisms are so numerous that it is not worth listing more than a couple.
Heather presumably has lived through the terrible winter of 1794-5, when birds fell dead out of the trees, and in fact, even the mildest winter in the UK is decidedly cold and damp. Despite this, she does not think to order any flannel petticoats or warm underwear to take with her on a winter’s voyage across the Atlantic. This gives the male lead an opportunity to show he cares by having fashioned for her some quilted underwear.
Then, why does Brandon Birmingham (whose father was apparently ‘an English aristocrat’ who during the American War of Independence renounced his citizenship and therefore, any title he had, though we are never told exactly what his was) think that he would be entitled to ‘the axe’ for rape and abduction? It would have been a short drop hanging for him along with the hoi polloi.
There are myriad misunderstandings following on not, it seems, from Birmingham’s raping Heather three times on board the ship, or for his Dominic Alistair impersonation in the inn. No, none of that matters; what does come between them is that Birmingham has told Heather that as he suspects she was in the plot along with her aunt and the others to force him to marry her. Accordingly, he vows to punish her by treating her as an upper servant, allowing her no money, and refusing to consummate the marriage.
For months, he is tormented by desire for her soft breasts and firm youthful body, and finally he resolves on another rape as a way of solving their problems. This, however, proves unnecessary. Heather is already waiting for him in a provocative nightdress of the sort they definitely did not wear in the late eighteenth century.
This, apparently, is very romantic and exciting.
I think what outraged me most is that the rapes that take place when first they meet are recalled by both as finally a good thing, a fit subject for joking, and even a topic for sentimental recollection (by the by, Heather has no ambiguous feelings, no distaste, about having a pregnancy as the result of the rape).
For instance, Heather reflects at once point that she ought to be grateful to him for ravishing her, as her life was so hard before with her abusive (and naturally, obese) aunt. At another time she says, ‘I was nothing before he met me.’
He is sentimentally attached to the dress that she was wearing when he first raped her – regarding it as ‘Their Dress’. He sternly admonishes her for bartering it for some cloth which she uses to make him a Christmas present. She sheds tears and apologises.
At the end, before a wholly improbable piece of love making – though the ‘hero’ is pale from blood loss from a shooting, he can always rise to the occasion – he and Heather have this exchange. He says of one of the many would-be rapists in her life: –
‘”He got what he deserved for trying to rape you.”
She looked at him slyly. “You were the one who raped me. What were your just deserts?”
He grinned leisurly. “I got my just deserts when I had to marry a cocky wench like you.”’
He then threatens to spank her. The timid Heather shows some apprehension. Then he reassures her smugly, ‘”Madam, you amaze me. Never once have I laid a hand to you and yet you still act as if you expect me to.”’
As a critic said of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela: ‘It is sentimental and obscene. The obscenity lies in the sentimentality.’
The Original Bodice Ripper: Review of ‘The Flame and the Flower’ by Kathleen E. Woodiwss
Marty-Stu rapes Mary-Sue and then they find a love so true…
I am so glad that I have finished this (by the way, I read it for research: honestly!). I detested reading it; and it was epic length. The only reason I am not giving it one star is because an online friend of mine said that it had helped her in dealing with memories of sexual abuse.
It has been argued that the whole ‘rape to love’ theme so beloved of the Bodice Rippers of the 1970’s developed from the fact that the US was many decades behind the UK and parts of Europe in accepting a woman’s right to sexual pleasure; this being so, readers of this age group were attracted by the comforting fantasy of a man who is at first a sexual aggressor coming to love and treat the object of his lust with tenderness and respect.
This being so, I will give it two stars. This is the most acid review that I have written about any book. As I have often said, I don’t like giving low star, savage reviews and only award them for novels which romanticise rapist so-called heroes or the brutalisation of women.
Even so,being a softy, I doubt I would have been able to bring myself to write it, had the author still been alive.
This story seems to be a verison of Georgette Heyer’s ‘Devil’s Cub’ meets Margaret Mitchell’s ‘Gone with the Wind’.
From ‘Devil’s Cub’ there is the abduction on a ship by a seemingly wicked man who misunderstands the female lead’s purpose and mistakes her for ‘a light woman’, the male lead making a rape attempt (in this case, after earlier successful ones) with the words: ‘Be damned, I’ll take you’ , the male lead’s murderously violent temper, his showing unexpected kindness to the female lead when she is seasick, etc.
Birmingham is also as a sea captain from Charleston, like Rhett Butler from ‘Gone With the Wind’, though Rhett Butler has the ability to laugh at himself that this ‘hero’ does not, and is far likable and intelligent generally. Birmingham’s late mother and the female lead are obviously based upon Scarlett O’Hara’s mother Ellen; the countless other similarities include a version of the sharp-tongued Grandma Fontaine, who in this case becomes one of a chorus devoted to singing the female lead’s praises and running down other women.
I have to find some positive things to say about this. I suppose the writing can be described as vivid; in some passages, it is even striking if overburdened with adjectives and adverbs. For instance, this description of a storm: –
‘Horse and rider entered a forest gone wild. Once lazy branches lashed and stung and whipped and clawed. The trees bent and swayed in what seemed a frenzied determination to snatch her from the horse and failing, moaned their frustration to the wind.’
In its day, it was a phenomenal success.
Views about rapist ‘heroes’ have changed, and I am frankly disturbed that it still receives glowing reviews.
On the writing style, unfortunately, this is far more typical:–
‘To her he appeared as some splendid, godlike being. Murmuring her love to him, she slid her arms about his neck, pressing her soft breasts into the mat of hair that covered his chest …’
For someone who is supposed to be devout, the female lead doesn’t seem very troubled by the First Commandment. Elizabeth Gaskell would have pointed the moral to that.
Such tautologies as ‘He laughed at her with mirth, throwing his splendid head up high’ abound. I felt that if I read once more about her, ‘looking up at him timidly’ or the muscle in his jaw ‘twitching spasmodically in his anger’, or ‘the elderly ******* grinning from ear to ear’ I would turn into a dung beetle. Sometimes, the ‘hero’s’ eyes are like ‘flames of fire’ or ‘burning with passion’s fire’. At other times, he ‘chuckles softly’. He is very fond of doing that.
I lost count of the number of times the allure of these ‘soft breasts’ is mentioned, or of descriptons of Heather’s ‘ flowing dark tresses’, or her other charms. Possibly more often than we hear about his ‘dark, handsome face’.
There is no man who meets Heather who doesn’t fall for her, and all the women long for Brandon Birmingham, which surely qualifies the pair as fully paid up, card-holding members of the Mary-Sue and Marty-Stu club .
All men are seized by violent desire the minute they set eyes on Heather. Fat, repulsive ones are stimulated to unusual athleticism in trying to rape her, and as a result are thrown out of windows or knocked flying into bushes by the male lead.
Interestingly, fat people in this are invariably evil, with the exception of Hatti , rightly described in a Goodreads review as a ‘Cringeworthy Mammy stereotype.’
Here
And after all, she is merely, ‘ample’. She is the black domestic tyrant slave wholly devoted to the interests of her white owners. A typical speech from her is: – ‘Oh Lordy, Master Bran, we done thought something bad had happened to you.’
Interestingly, by contrast, none of the black men in this are given any personality or indeed, any sort of distinguishing personal characteristics at all.
At least, the racism of Margaret Mitchell in ‘Gone With The Wind’ had the excuse that was published in 1936, and begun ten years earlier. This novel was published in 1972, long after the Civil Rights movement. Yes, of course there was slavery in the US of 1799; but should it have been portrayed wholly uncritically?
Everyone regards the ‘hero’ with admiration, even those who suspect the rape, though a couple express misgivings over it . All the single local women swoon over this fellow. In fact, his jilted former fiancée continues to pursue him shamelessly. Just why everyone admires him, when he is depicted as being as callow and insensitive as a boy of fourteen at the age of thirty-five or six, isn’t explained, except by his being handsome and rich and something of a bully. Neither does he have the excuse of having lost his mother early; she died when he was twenty-five.
[image error]
*Warning: spoilers follow*
This fiancée is understandably humiliated when the ‘hero’ turns up with a bride at the port where she comes to greet him back to the US. Here, one wonders at his total lack of social graces. Even given that overseas post would be disrupted by the French Revolutionary Wars, he might have had the sense to send one of his men with a note ahead of him before coming ashore, asking his brother to get his former fiancée out of the way. No, such delicacy is beyond him, and all of a piece with his performance as a rapist.
This rejected fiancée makes a point of aiming cruel barbs at the poor, helpless Heather (her late nineteenth century name being one anachronism among many concerning the late eighteenth century UK).
This woman, Louisa, is referred to as a ‘blonde bitch’ (off topic: as one born with light coloured hair, I find the way two terms are commonly casually linked in light novels to be wholly unfair).Strangely enough, the ludicrously named ‘Brandon Birmingham’ -it may be that the author had never taken note of what an unromantic city the Birmingham in England is- though he is portrayed as a macho man, shows a feminine streak of spite in his replies to these taunts.
For instance, this exchange, when the ‘hero’ is seen by his ex- fiancée carrying the now heavily pregnant Heather upstairs, is typical:
‘”Do you do this every night, Brandon?” she enquired jeeringly, with a raised eyebrow. “It surely must put a strain upon your back, darling…’
‘His face was expressionless as he made his reply, “I’ve lifted heavier women in my life, including you…’
Louisa keeps walking into these put-downs as if she can’t see them coming, though she is supposed to be so socially confident. In fact, she is, like most of the characters, wholly unbelievable.
Credible characters can make a wholly incredible plot seem believable, but these are as unreal as the events in the story. These characters are caricatures.
Though the story begins in England, the author shows a remarkably blasé attitude towards the need for any familiarity with the topography, language or customs of the UK of the late eighteenth century.
In fact, the action begins in ‘the English countryside’, with no county specified. The description is apparantly much admired, and is certainly striking, but it is set in a geographically impossible location of moorland which is nevertheless within a day’s journey of London on the appalling roads of 1799. Also, here, there is apparently a climate so dry that on a hot summer’s day dust hangs continually in the air. Even when roads were only partly paved, there could be no place in England, even in a prolonged drought, dry and hot enough to create that effect.
These anachronisms are so numerous that it is not worth listing more than a couple.
Heather presumably has lived through the terrible winter of 1794-5, when birds fell dead out of the trees, and in fact, even the mildest winter in the UK is decidedly cold and damp. Despite this, she does not think to order any flannel petticoats or warm underwear to take with her on a winter’s voyage across the Atlantic. This gives the male lead an opportunity to show he cares by having fashioned for her some quilted underwear.
Then, why does Brandon Birmingham (whose father was apparently ‘an English aristocrat’ who during the American War of Independence renounced his citizenship and therefore, any title he had, though we are never told exactly what his was) think that he would be entitled to ‘the axe’ for rape and abduction? It would have been a short drop hanging for him along with the hoi polloi.
There are myriad misunderstandings following on not, it seems, from Birmingham’s raping Heather three times on board the ship, or for his Dominic Alistair impersonation in the inn. No, none of that matters; what does come between them is that Birmingham has told Heather that as he suspects she was in the plot along with her aunt and the others to force him to marry her. Accordingly, he vows to punish her by treating her as an upper servant, allowing her no money, and refusing to consummate the marriage.
For months, he is tormented by desire for her soft breasts and firm youthful body, and finally he resolves on another rape as a way of solving their problems. This, however, proves unnecessary. Heather is already waiting for him in a provocative nightdress of the sort they definitely did not wear in the late eighteenth century.
This, apparently, is very romantic and exciting.
I think what outraged me most is that the rapes that take place when first they meet is recalled by both as finally a good thing, a fit subject for joking, and even a topic for sentimental recollection (by the by, Heather has no ambiguous feelings, no distaste, about having a pregnancy as the result of the rape).
For instance, Heather reflects at once point that she ought to be grateful to him for ravishing her, as her life was so hard before with her abusive (and naturally, obese) aunt. At another time she says, ‘I was nothing before he met me.’
He is sentimentally attached to the dress that she was wearing when he first raped her – regarding it as ‘Their Dress’. He sternly admonishes her for bartering it for some cloth which she uses to make him a Christmas present. She sheds tears and apologises.
At the end, before a wholly improbable piece of love making – though the ‘hero’ is pale from blood loss from a shooting, he can always rise to the occasion – he and Heather have this exchange. He says of one of the many would-be rapists in her life: –
‘”He got what he deserved for trying to rape you.”
She looked at him slyly. “You were the one who raped me. What were your just deserts?”
He grinned leisurly. “I got my just deserts when I had to marry a cocky wench like you.”’
He then threatens to spank her. The timid Heather shows some apprehension. Then he reassures her smugly, ‘”Madam, you amaze me. Never once have I laid a hand to you and yet you still act as if you expect me to.”’
As a critic said of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela: ‘It is sentimental and obscene. The obscenity lies in the sentimentality.’
September 27, 2019
US English and its Continued Use of Forms from Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century UK English
It is an interesting fact that US English retains some of the words and expressions of seventeenth and eighteenth century English, which are wrongly thought of as ‘American English’.
For instance, there is use of the word that is commonly now spelt as ‘aint’, but can be found as ‘in’t’ and ‘an’t’. That was once as common as the modern ‘isn’t’ and only later stigmatized as non-standard English in the UK. You will find it in plays of the Restoration era such as William Congreve’s play ‘Love for Love’ (1696) and in writings by Joanathon Swift.
You will find ‘an’t’ as a matter of interest, in Samuel Richardson’s ‘Pamela’ (1740) and as ‘in’t’ in Fanny Burney’s ‘Evelina’ (1775).
‘Ain’t’ in fact, persisted up to the early nineteenth century, and was used in Pierce Egan’s ‘Life in London’ (1823).
Then, in reading one William Shakespeare, I have come across various expressions seen as quintessentially American, and meaning more or less the same thing as they do today. For instance, ‘trash’ in Julius Caesar, and ‘right now’ in Henry VI Part II.
There is also the use of such expressions as the US ‘Out the’ rather than the UK ‘Out of the’form.
This can be confusing to those not particularly well versed in the development of English, and various readers have taken me to task for using ‘ US English’ in my novels set in the UK of the eighteenth century.
This Amazon review by an Australian reader of my spoof highwayman romance ‘Ravensdale’ takes this view to extremes, insisting that in the English speaking countries outside the US, the expressions ‘hey’ and ‘for sure’ have never been used:
when Americans write English period novels: or, why you should use a better editor
In fact, ‘hey’ is a very old English exclamation (though not, so far as I know, used as a greeting as in the US), and you need look no further than a nursery rhyme to find it: ie,in the sixteenth century nursery rhyme: ‘Hey Diddle Diddle, the Cat and the Fiddle’ . Again, it features in Shakespeare’s song, ‘Hey Nonny Nonny’ from ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ (1598/1599).
As for ‘for sure’ , it is constantly used by Mrs Honour in Henry Fielding’s ‘Tom Jones’ (1749) and also features in Richardson’s ‘Pamela’.
[image error]
And talking about ‘Ravensdale’, for those interested, it is at the moment free on Amazon.com Here
and Amazon.co.uk Here
…And I would like to add that whilst I may sometimes be confused by the content of reviews of my novels, I always appreciate them, good or bad.
September 11, 2019
Review of Jordan Rosenfeld’s ‘How to Write a Page Turner’
[image error]
I have just finished reading Jordan Rosenfeld’s ‘How to Write a Page Turner’. I thought the advice in it was invaluable.
Not only that, but it is detailed; too many ‘how to’ books for writers are not sufficiently specific. You might be told to ‘infuse the pages with tension’ and to ‘keep raising the conflict’ besides, ‘creating memorable characters’ , but the writers might just as well say ‘be talented’ ‘write with flair’ or some such thing.
This advice is also concise. There is no waffling and rambling. You are told exactly what to do and how to do it.
The author’s main argument is this: what is needed to create a page turner is tension, tension all the time. We are often told that tension and conflict are what drive a plot forward, but in fact, conflict is arguably another aspect of tension.
The author breaks down the specific forms of tension into four elements, danger, conflict, uncertainty and withholding. She describes how these can be utilised, and in further chapters goes on to discuss in detail tension with characters, plot tension, and tension in exposition.
In the part on plotting, there is an especially helpful bit on a plotting device that may well prove priceless for people like me, who generally start out without any but the vaguest plot in mind.
Ms Rosenfeld divides the sections of a book into various ‘Energetic Markers.
Firstly, there is the Set Up: that is, your character’s ordinary world. This is closely followed – usually, within approximately 30 pages –by the Inciting Incident, namely, some sort of threat to the order of that character’s ordinary world. About a quarter of the way through comes the Point of No Return, that is, when your character becomes inextricably caught up in a course of action or events from which there is no returning to the old status quo. In due course, the Dark Night and the Triumph follow.
The latter is when your protagonist takes on the antagonist, be that antagonist an arch evil dictator or a series of impersonal conventions. This does not necessarily lead to a happy ending, but should be some sort of moral triumph.
(This interests me, as Nineteen Eighty Four, in the final confrontation between O’Brien and Winston Smith, far from there being any sort of moral triumph for the forces of good, they are in the person of Smith completely destroyed; he not only betrays Julia, but he comes to love Big Brother. The reader is left with a sense of complete despair).
There is detailed advice about how to maintain that tension at each of these points. Obviously, however, with regard to keeping up a reader’s interest, the most important part is the beginning. If people are going to stop reading, it is usually in the first quarter of the book (here, I think I can claim a record; at least two people stopped reading halfway through That Scoundrel Émile Dubois when I thought that I had really ramped the excitement up, with vampirism and time warps raining down.)
Ms Rosenfeld provides some important hints about retaining reader interest early in the novel. She points out that here, to keep your readers’ attention, you must have as much excitement as you can. You must make the character sympathetic, not by giving a lot of detail about past trauma, etc – but by putting him or her in a situation where there is tension from the start, due to unhappiness, some sort of imminent threat, external or internal, and perhaps due to some unspecified past event that has brought about this state of unease or threat.
She describes how large chunks of back story, an excess of exposition, or an unexplained or not sufficiently relevant inciting incident can lose readers’ attention in those first, crucial pages up to the ‘call to change’ in the inciting incident.
There are also some excellent hints about style and the use of imagery to create gripping word pictures.
Another interesting aspect of Rosenfeld’s approach is her recommendation that rather than thinking in terms of plot development – apart from through those ‘Energetic Markers’ that is – the writer should think in terms of individual scenes, each of which must have its own goal and arc of tension, the combination of which create the plot structure.
My main criticism of this book is that I didn’t understand why the author made reference to, but chose to use almost nothing in the way of example from classic, brilliant writers ike Mary Shelley, Margaret Atwood and Stephen King.
Instead, she quoted extensively from a range of less distinguished authors. Some were excellent, but unfortunately, some, far from making me want to turn the page, made me want to stop reading on the spot.
It may have been that I was in a particularly cranky mindset when I read this. Still, in the extracts I came across sentences without subjects or verbs. As Ms. Rosenfeld shows from her advice that she has an expert knowledge of grammatical rules, I think there must be a general understanding that in YA fantasy these can be abandoned for effect.
There were also fantasy worlds apparently based vaguely on European feudalism that even from the extracts sounded economically impossible with such a small economic surplus (unless they maintained their oversized courts largely through magic). There was an astonishing historical anachronism in a serious historical novel that made me snort into my tea.
Many of the characters seemed to be flaccidly self-indulgent and self pitying (I hope these were the tension creating flaws that they needed to overcome). Finally, a large number of the names were (seemingly unintentionally) ludicrous.
As these are best selling books, my objections are obviously a minority viewpoint. A couple of the books sounded so interesting that I may well get round to reading them myself.
Overall, then, I would recommend reading this book for the excellent advice about tension, and only skimming through the extracts.
August 27, 2019
Shelf Life: The Book of Better Endings by Rob Gregson: An Original and Very Funny Fantasy Novel
[image error]
One of the favourite pieces of advice to writers about creating tension is : – ‘Torment your protagonist’. And, of course, the said writers often don’t stop there. Sometimes, they kill them off. This is to say nothing of the minor characters. How many of those get bumped off in the average writer’s career?
Rob Gregson’s ‘Shelf Life’ is a highly original and gripping piece of black comedy about the world of narratives, and of what happens to prematurely killed and murdered characters of all sorts, from protagonists down to those with the most insignificant roles.
Cathy Finn leads an uneventful life running a bookshop. She is the less exciting and ornamental of a pair of sisters, and fully satisfied with that.
Unfortunately, one day, she is an unwilling witness to a crime. A ‘personal injury consultant’ is sent to eliminate her.
Just as he shoots her dead, she is taken to another reality: that is, New Tibet. Here she learns that she was only a minor character in the mystery novel in which her sister was the female lead.
This is because all realities are narratives, and in the mysterious Dome at New Tibet, they all converge. Now Cathy Finn is free to lead any sort of life that takes her fancy.
But the redoubtable Cathy Finn only wants to lead one – her old one. She is determined to escape back to her old reality and reunite with her mother and sister; this despite the fact that everyone assures her that she will never be able to return.
Here, Cathy Finn shows that she is more courageous and resourceful than either she, or anyone else, could ever have suspected…
Through her attempts to get back, she becomes involved with a world hopping , nut chewing slob and petty smuggler known as ‘Hitch the Postman’, who has been made the unlikely candidate to deal with the threat to the integrity of the Dome and the consequent safety of New Tibet.
There follows an hilarious, and strangely believable, race through a series of all sorts of narratives, a chase across worlds with Hitch, the loutish security man Duggan, and the larger than life Professor Locke which makes for delightfully dark comedy.
They race through bad dystopias, tales of zombie apocalypses, mediocre sci-fi’s, fan fiction, hackneyed westerns, re-writes of classical novels, Blyton-esque children’s stories and just about every other sort of tale.
With an hilarious and all-too-believable cast of characters – from the seedy, self serving Hitch to the cold and calculating Max Roberts – this book is a for all those who like me, revel in dark comedy.
Here are some of my favourite quotes: –
‘The watchman snorted. “Yeah. Right. D’you want the truth, Miss Finn? They told him only to work with his closest friends; people he could really trust.” He flashed his charge a disdainful grin. “You don’t have any friends, do you, Hitch? You’ve p*****d on so many people’s chips, you’ve got nobody left.”’
‘ ‘Hitch’s face turned a colour most commonly associated with kitchen appliances.’
‘”We’ve been lured into a work in progress; a tale left deliberately unfinished, designed to swallow us up like an insect in amber.”’
‘“Stay your hands,” said Silas, his voice still strangely amplified. “End this motiveless malignity. You fret and squabble over meagre nothings.”
“Motives and what?” said Jones. “What’s ‘e goin’ on about?”
Two figures now stood in the doorway: one thin and pale, one fat and flushed – both looking as though they’d been selected from opposite ends of some peculiar line-up of the aesthetically-challenged.
You can buy the book on Amazon.co.uk here
and on Amazon.com here
August 13, 2019
The Peterloo Massacre and its Bicentenary on 16 August 2019
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On 16 August 2019, it will be the bicentenary of the infamous Peterloo Massacre of 1819.
In this dismal episode in British history, the part time militia of the Manchester Yeomanry Cavalry charged a peaceful crowd of 60,000. This gathering was in fact a large part of the then population of Lancashire, many of whom were impoverished cotton workers who had come to St Peter’s Field to hear reformers, led by the notorious Henry Hunt, talk on the issue of parliamentary reform. Through this means,they hoped to improve their living conditions.
Such were the vagaries and injustices of the electoral system in Britain at the time, that not only were the majority of the working population not allowed to vote , but there was not even an MP in Manchester.
On seeing such a massive crowd gathering, the local magistrates, watching from a nearby building, panicked. The normal procedure for dispersing a supposedly disorderly crowd was to have the Riot Act read, and if they crowd had not dispersed in an hour, to send in troops.
Professional mounted troops would move slowly into a crowd, using their horses and the flats of their swords to part them. However, on St Peter’s Fields on that day, the local militias charged into the crowd, using the sabres to cut down men, woman and children alike. Women holding babies were sabred, and the horrors of the day were vividly reported by the before then unsympathetic journalist from The Times, who was standing on the platform as the massacre began, and who was mistaken for a radical and arrested.
It may astonish people to read that the official death toll was only 15, with about 700 people who either were reported as injured. However, it has to be remembered that many of those injured, however severely, would not have dared to report it. After the massacre the victims, and not the aggressors, were treated as criminals, and feared discrimination by their employers. Lord Livepool’s government supported the local magistrate’s foolhardly decision to send in the inexperienced (and possibly drunken) local militias.We only have the figures of those injured from the numbers of those incapacited who applied for funds for relief from a charitable fund set up by sympathizers.
No doubt many of those injured subsequently died as a result of their injuries some weeks or even months later. In those days of primitive medical care and lack of welfare provison, a serious injury was often a death sentence, and for a wage earner in the family to be incapacitated equalled the threat of starvation for a family. Many handloom weavers and spinners at this time were living in a state of semi starvation already.
One of those who later died of injuries received on the day was 21 year old John Lees, a spinner and Waterloo veteran from Oldham, whose father had disapproved of his attending the meeting, and who did not at first realise the serious nature of his son’s injuries. When John Lees died on 7 September, his father demanded an inquest. The jury was ready to return a verdict of wilful murder against the militia, when the coroner took advantage of a legal loophole to dissolve the whole proceedings.
Subsequently, the repressive Six Acts were rushed through parliament, which effectively muzzled radical newspapers, political meetings, marching and any form of dissent.
Henry Hunt, Samuel Bamford and the other radical leaders were arrested for treason. This capital offence was latter commuted to a a lesser one, and they served prison sentences of severaql yesrs.
This was the outrage which inspired the poet Shelley to write his famous ‘Masque of Anarchy’ (so subversive that it wasn’t in fact published until 1831, a couple of years after his own death).
‘Rise like lions after slumber;
Rise in unvanquishable number,
Cast your chains to earth like dew,
Which in your sleep hath fallen on you,
Ye are many; they are few.’
It is a grim enough episode in British history. However, I felt that I ought to write a story based about the Peterloo Massacre. I didn’t actually know at the time when I began work on my novel, that there is in fact an epic feature film coming out about it, and I thought that the occasion of the bi-centenary should not slip by without someone writing of the appalling suffering of the Lancashire cotton workers at this time, and particularly, the injustices meted out on that day.
With luck there will now be many articles, books, blog posts and television posts over the next year on the bi-centenary of this shameful episode, which shows the neglected dark side of Regency history and the repressive nature of the state.
July 28, 2019
More on Antagonists: Elizabeth Gaskell’s ‘Sylvia’s Lovers’ and the Eponymous Lovers as Antagonists.
Following on from my recent post about antagonists, it is interesting how that role is often played by an inhuman character, and can even be an impersonal force. Sometimes, the identity of the antagonist can even appear to shift from one character to another: one formerly not perceived as an antagonist can become one as regards the protagonist’s aims and goals.
How far this is deliberate obviously varies. In older novels the antagonist, of course, was largely seen as ‘the villain’ and was as often as not fairly obvious, like Count Dracula. Perhaps this is because there weren’t exactly a lot of ‘how to’ books on writing going about in Victorian times.
Perhaps this is because there weren’t exactly a lot of ‘how to’ books on writing going about in Victorian timesThese days, all writers are far more aware of the mechanics of plot, character development, the necessity of a strong antagonist, and so on.
The shifting role of who is the antagonist is particularly intriguing in one of my favourite classic Victorian stories, Elizabeth Gakelll’s Sylvia’s Lovers. How far this is intentional I find it hard to assess: perhaps the author did it unconsciously.
In the beginning, the antagonist comes across clearly as an impersonal force, the use and abuse of the press gang to recruit sailors by force to fight in the French Revolutionary Wars. In depicting how this changes, I can’t make this point without detailing the plot at various points as I discuss the antagonist aspect. I hope regular readers who have read other articles about this favourite novel of mine will bear with me.
In the second chapter we see a press gang taking the crew of a whaler as it returns from Greenland. A riot breaks out amongst the townsfolk of Monkshaven (Whitby), then a busy whaling port. The passionate, untamed and pretty teenage Sylvia Robson reacts with violent longing to join in the riot. Her shopman cousin Philip Hepburn, who is anything but her idea of a man, regards that as ridiculous in a young girl. His own view is that ‘it’s the law and you can’t do anything about it’.
It was not legal for the press gang to impress whalemen, who were supposedly protected by law from their encroachments. Least of all was it legal to impress them as they returned for six months’ away in the Greenland Seas. In practice these regulations were ignored: any Naval captain was expected to make up his crew with few scruples and much expediency.
For instance, In the Hornblower series, Horatio Hornblower as an naval lieutenant and then as a captain knows, and quietly endorses, the press gang working for his ship taking ‘country bumpkins’ who have obviously never been near the sea in their lives. Uts remit is limited to ‘seagoing men’, but this is seen as an unfortunate necessity: without flouting the regulations a captain could not get enough of a crew to leave port. This is a fact to be taken into account when he come to the later career of the gallant rebel, Sylvia’s love object Charley Kinraid.
What can be termed ‘the inciting incident’ of the story, which sets off Sylvia’s infatuation for the Specksioneer Kinraid , is caused by his showy heroic defiance of the gang who come to impress the crew of The Good Fortune.
This tale is recorded to the impressionable Sylvia and her family by the tailor Donkin when he visits their farm. He recounts how Kinraid stood over the hatches, armed with a whaling knife and two pistolos, and declares: ‘He has two good pistols, and summat besides, and he don’t care for his life, being a bachelor, but all below are married men, you see, and he’ll put an end to the first two chaps who come near the hatches…’
Stirring heroism, indeed. He does just that with the first two who approach, and for my own part I had to feel for those men, unscrupulous or not, when they were ordinary sailors themselves, and under orders to obey or face hanging for mutiny.
In fact, there is another single man in the crew below, Kinraid’s friend Darley. He does however, have a bedridden sister, though alsi a father living and working for the Vicar, so perhaps that is the reason he is seen as having dependants.
The gang shoot down Kinraid and kick him aside for dead, and fire into the hold, killing Darley, and taking off the others.
Sylvia is agog to hear if Kinraid will survive his wounds. In fact, He is lucky that he was ‘kicked aside for dead’, as if he hadn’t been asssumed to have been killed, he would have been tried for mutiny. She goes to enquire after him of his cousins, the Corneys, and at the same time, arranges to go to Darley’s funeral with Molly Corney. Here, she meets Kinraid, whom two sailor friends have carried him up the famous steps to the church. Although he looks like a living corpse, she is still very taken with him, ‘Full of shy admiration of the nearest approach to a hero that she had ever seen.’
Few young men could resist the lure of such a pretty admirer, and when her father, Daniel Robson, himself a former whaler, invites Kinraid to come and visit them, he takes up the invitation and impresses the girl with tales of sea adventures and smuggling. Besides, as he recovers, he regains his looks, with his waving dark hair, flashing dark eyes, and equally flashing white teeth. He is reputedly, besides, the ‘boldest Specksioneer on the Greenland Seas’ (poor whales; nobody, not even the humane author, seemed to think of them). He is generally a wholly fitting object for Sylvia’s girlish admiration.
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Meanwhile, she has another, largely silent but dogged admirer in her cousin Hepburn. He has a killjoy attitude to harmless fun, having been raised by puritanically devout people who disapprove of all festivity and high spirits, even in the young. Alice Rose, with whom he lives along with his fellow shopman William Coulson, was once a pretty, blooming girl who insisted on marrying the wicked whaler Jack Rose; she is now so embittered that she regards any worldly ambition as futile.
William Coulson’s late sister Annie was once courted by Kinraid back in Newcastle for a couple of years, but broke off things when he saw another girl he preferred. Rumour has it that after that, he moved on from that girl in turn when he saw yet another he liked better. Annie Coulson subsequently died within six months, and Coulson puts it down to a broken heart.
Besides beinhg solemn, Philip has an unprepossessing appearance with an indoor complexion and a long upper lip. He is wholly tame and seemingly lacking in masculinity in comparison to the dashing Kinraid. He has a blind spot about his obsessive infatuation with Sylvia; he cannot see that his plan to win the lively, ignorant, thoughtless girl through rising to become the owner of the drapers where he works, and through teaching her to read, is, to say the least, ill thought out.
It is worth pointing out here that Sylvia seems as infatuated at this point with adventures in the Greenland Seas as she does with the man Charley Kinraid himself. Hilary Schoer makes the astute point that Sylvia, as a girl with a restricted and largely domestic role, cannot aspire to such adventures herself. Though she dreams of these, she is compelled to sublimate by playing the female role and to fall in love with the man who personifies those adventuers in her eyes.
Kinraid goes back to sea, but fifteen months later he attends a New Year’s party to which Philip escorts Sylvia, and on this visit, he courts her passionately – to the annoyance of both Hepburn and his cousin Bessy Corney, who regards herself as unofficially engaged to him. It is typical of Kinraid’s extrovert character that he finishes up the New Year festivities by dancing a hornpipe. This is in fact what Wiley Ben does at a festivity in Adam Bede, but while his performance is depicted as ludicrous, no doubt Kinraid’s is executed with dash.
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Before he sails to Greenland, Kinraid comes to ask Sylvia to marry him with suitable directness and dash: ‘Ever since I saw yo’ in the corner of the kitchen, sitting crouching behind my uncle, I as good as seore I’d have yo’ for my wife, or never wed at all.’ She cannot believe her luck. When the next day, Hepburn turns up to tell her of Kinraid’s reputation as a ‘light o’ love’ and the story of Annie Coulson she dismisses it as a ‘back biting tale’.
The next day Heburn walks along the beach the seven miles to Hartlepool, it being the most direct route (It is an interesting comment on how used to walking people were in this era that Hepburn, who follows a despised and sedentary occupation, does this with ease). To his dismay, he sees Kinraid walking ahead of him on his way back to Newcastle. By a bitter irony (or a karmic test), Hepburn is the only witness when Kinraid is taken by a press gang.
He leaves a message with Hepburn for Sylvia. Outrageously, after hearing more talk of Kinraid’s past behaviour with women in a Newcastle pub, Hepburn decides against telling her the truth. He will not let Sylvia make he own mistakes. The community at Monkshaven, finding Kinraid’s hat washed up on the shore, assume he has somehow been drowned, and Hepburn remains silent. Whatever the reader might think of Charley Kinraid’s character, this an appalling piece of treachery.
At this point in the novel, from the point of view of Sylvia as protagonist, Hepburn largely takes over from the press gang as the antagonist, in that he is the chief block to her achieving her wishes.
While Sylvia mourns Kinraid and the happiness she is sure she would have shared with him, Hepburn – helped by dread, impersonal forces when the foolish Daniel Robson is hanged for leading a crowd to burn the press gang’s headquarters – continues to act to thwart the heroine’s natural inclinations. His aunt Bell Robson loses her mind under the strain. Sylvia and the labourer Kester struggle on to try and keep the farm going, but now the dispirited Sylvia gives up on the fight. Kester urges her, ‘Dunnot to and marry a man as thou’s noane taken wi’, and another, as is most like for t’b e dead, but who, mebbe, is alive, havin’ a pull on thy heart.’
That is exactly what Sylvia does. She feels imprisoned in the house behind the shop in town. It is a dismal marriage for her; she is unable to forget Kinraid. She and Hepburn are unsuited.
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It is never made clear whether she is actually physically indifferent to him or whether she is actively repelled by him. As a respectable Victorian writer, Gaskell would have considered it wholly inappropriate to make this explicit, or even to dwell too much on it. Possibly because of this, it is possible to read too much into the fact that one of the chapters in the first volume is called ‘Attraction and Repulsion’ – the said ‘repulsion’ may reflect more on magnets than anything.
Anyway, this is the period of Hepburn’s greatest success in both his working life and his personal life. Still, he finds that marriage to the now quiet and docile Sylvia a disappointment; he misses the old lively one. He remains the antagonist as far as Sylvia’s goals are concerned, save for her having the baby Bella, which is an endless source of delight to her.
Then, of course, Charley Kinraid returns. He is now a Lieutenant in the Royal Navy, having been promoted for his participation in Sir Sidney Smith’s adventures. While Sylvia and Kinraid’s indignation and disgust at Hepburn’s dishonesty are ferocious. Unfortunately, I have to say – slightly off topic – that part of the writing here is absurd in some places, if tragic in others.
For instance: ‘This is Kinraid come back again to wed me. He is alive; he has never been dead…’ Well, he wouldn’t exactly be likely to have been dead and then alive, would he? That doesn’t tend to happen in this world with ordinary mortals. Then there are Kinraid’s own speeches, which have a stereotypical, cardboard flavour about them: ‘Take that!…Leave that damned fellow to repent the trick he paid an honest sailor.’
Anyway, although she refuses to leave with Kinraid, Sylvia swears an oath never to forgive Hepburn or to live with him as his wife again. Hepburn, overcome with shame, packs a few possessions and runs away to join the army. He has the idea that if he can return as a hero too, she might forgive him. Presumably, Sylvia does not give any thought to Kinraid’s certain role in raising press gangs now he is a naval officer himself, as she keeps her high opinion. At the Siege of Acre he comes across a wounded Kinraid (this man really is indestructable) and rescues him. However, shortly afterwards, he is horribly disfigured by an explosion. Unfitted for service and unrecognisable, he drifts home to live in a state of semi starvation.
Meanwhile, Sylvia has learnt some disturbing news. Within seven months of their dramatic parting, Kinraid has married someone else, a pretty, superficial heiress. Now Sylvia is humiliated, indignant against Kinraid, mortified that he has been able to forget her so quickly and replace her with someone else. She bitterly tells Hester, ‘Those one thinks the most on, forgets one soonest.’
As Arthur Pollard remarks, ‘ It might be said that Kinraid is hardly individualised enough to carry the weigh the part he is given… On Kinraid’s return there seems to be a certain inadequacy in his response, a conventional theatrical quality…Finally, however, he shows that he really is just conventional. By marrying the superficial woman we hear about, he is shown to be superficial himself, as superficial as some people said he was and the reader has at times suspected.’
This is a very clever approach of the author’s. Now, Sylvia experiences disillusionment with the man she has idolised for years. ‘I think I’ll niver call him Kinraid agin.’ If Hepburn has broken the first commandment in worshipping Sylvia, she has done the same with Kinraid.
In fact, while at the end of the story Sylvia is reconciled with Hepburn- who has done some more heroics in rescuing their daughter from the waves – to some extent, he has changed places with Kinraid in her eyes. Now, in an odd reversal of roles, he is the wounded, corpse like hero. Previously, Hepburn formed a human barrier between Sylvia and the fulfilment of her dream – marriage to Charley Kinraid – now it seems to her that she has discovered her mistake about Kinraid’s shallowness too late. Now she sees it as having served as a barrier to any chance of happiness with Hepburn. Whatever the truth of that, she loses them both.
Overall, as some modern critics have argued, Sylvia cannot make a right choice between her eponymous lovers, as neither of them has shown himself worthy of her trust. Neither could make her happy. Kinraid is handsome and dynamic but superficial and opportunistic. If Hepburn had hehaved honourably and Sylvia had duly married him on his return, she would certainly have been disillusioned fairly soon. Hepburn is deeply devoted but plain looking and dismal and selfishly keeps Sylvia from making her own mistakes through his obsession with her. He can only be unselfishly loving at the end of his life.
Thus, arguably, both male leads can be said also to play the part of antagonists regarding Sylvia’s happiness; Hepburn through his imprisoning devotion, Kinraid through being a false idol.
I was flattered that someone had made a meme out of my ‘Sylvia’s Lovers’ summary on social media. The problem is, that I can’t enlarge the copy I took of it enough to maake it legible, so I will quote it instead:
‘Philip Hepburn worships Sylvia Robson, and finds dishonour; Sylvia Robson worships Charley Kinraid, and finds dissilusionment. Charley Kinraid worships himself, and finds a wife who agrees with him and a career in the Royal Navy.’
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July 16, 2019
Transcending Genre: an Intersting Example from Light Music.
I haven’t yet finished my posts about antagonists, but I am writing this short one about something else as waking up with an old song sounding in my dreams set me to thinking.
I have never liked the type of music dubbed ‘Easy Listening’ generally, always thinking of it as the sort of stuff played in chain restaurants and supermarkets, middle-of-the road and bland, with a conventional feel to it and a sentimental tendency. In recent decades, I believe that it has now developed into something known as ‘lounge music’. Of course, a lot of outstanding singers and performers began their careers as ‘lounge singers’ – Frank Sinatra, Billy Joel and others. I am not deriding the talent of the singers, but I never took to the content of what they sang.
Anyway, be that as it may, I have always been deeply moved by one easy listening song, sung in fact by Matt Monro, ‘Softly, as I Leave You’. This was so even when I was young and hard.
Matt Monroe was to my mind massively underestimated as a singer. His baritone voice was surely outstanding. Frank Sinatra said this of him: ‘If I had to choose three of the finest male vocalists in the business, Matt would be one of them. His pitch was right on the nose. His word enunciations letter perfect. His understanding of a song, thorough.’
That must be mainly why the song comes to passionate life when he sings it. Besides that, though, it is, describing a final parting between loved ones as it does, dealing with rawer emotion than is typical of the ‘Easy Listening’ type of song (whether this parting is a lover leaving or a lover dying is a matter of interpretation: it seems Elvis Presley thought the latter).
I gather that the song as sung by Matt Montro was a translation from an original in Italian, called ‘Piano’ and sang by a singer called Mina. A songwriter called Hal Shaper, wrote lyrics in English:
Softly, I will leave you softly
For my heart would break if you should wake and see me go
So I leave you softly, long before you miss me
Long before your arms can beg me stay
For one more hour or one more day
After all the years, I can’t bear the tears to fall
So, softly as I leave you there
(Softly, long before you kiss me)
(Long before your arms can beg me stay)
For…
I woke up not only with the song running through my head this morning, but also, thinking that it transcended its genre exactly by stirring deeper emotions in the listener than might be expected in light music.
This made me think how that lesson can be applied to other art forms. I reflected all over again how it is surely a fine thing for genre writers like myself to do their utomost to make their writing sour, to go for one hundred percent, not the eighty-five to ninety per cent; to pull out the stops and to write something that makes the spine tingle and the emtoions sour – tin fact, to produce soemething that transcends the boundaries and requirements of genre writing.
Here is the Youtube link to hear the 1962 recording of the song by Matt Monro, which I think the best.
Transcending Genre
I haven’t yet finished my posts about antagonists, but I am writing this short one about something else as waking up with an old song sounding in my dreams set me to thinking.
I have never liked the type of music dubbed ‘Easy Listening’ generally, always thinking of it as the sort of stuff played in chain restaurants and supermarkets, middle-of-the road and bland, with a conventional feel to it and a sentimental tendency. In recent decades, I believe that it has now developed into something known as ‘lounge music’. Of course, a lot of outstanding singers and performers began their careers as ‘lounge singers’ – Frank Sinatra, Billy Joel and others. I am not deriding the talent of the singers, but I never took to the content of what they sang.
Anyway, be that as it may, I have always been deeply moved by one easy listening song, sung in fact by Matt Monro, ‘Softly, as I Leave You’. This was so even when I was young and hard.
Matt Monroe was to my mind massively underestimated as a singer. His baritone voice was surely outstanding. Frank Sinatra said this of him: ‘If I had to choose three of the finest male vocalists in the business, Matt would be one of them. His pitch was right on the nose. His word enunciations letter perfect. His understanding of a song, thorough.’
That must be mainly why the song comes to passionate life when he sings it. Besides that, though, it is, describing a final parting between loved ones as it does, dealing with rawer emotion than is typical of so much of the ‘Easy Listening’ type of song (whether this parting is a lover leaving or a lover dying is a matter of interpretation: it seems Elvis Presley thought the latter).
I gather that the song as sung by Matt Montroe was a translation from an original in Italian, called ‘Piano’ and sang by a singer called Mina. A songwriter called Hal Shaper, wrote lyrics in English:
Softly, I will leave you softly
For my heart would break if you should wake and see me go
So I leave you softly, long before you miss me
Long before your arms can beg me stay
For one more hour or one more day
After all the years, I can’t bear the tears to fall
So, softly as I leave you there
(Softly, long before you kiss me)
(Long before your arms can beg me stay)
For…
I woke up not only with the song running through my head this morning, but also, thinking that it transcended its genre exactly by stirring deeper emotions in the listener than might be expected in light music. This made me think all over again how perhaps it is a fine thing for genre writers like myself to go for one hundred percent – to pull out the stops – to write something that makes the spine tingle and the emtoions sour – to produce soemething transcedent.
Here is the Youtube link to hear the 1962 recording of the song, which I think the best.
July 6, 2019
The Antagonist in Various Forms
[image error]‘Evelina’ by Fanny Burney. Sir Clement Willoughby introduces himself with an air of gallantry, Letter XIII. This edition published in 1920. First published in 1778. FB, English novelist, 13 June 1752- 6 Jan 1840. Illustration by Hugh Thomson 1860-1920. (Photo by Culture Club/Getty Images)
I read somewhere the phrase, ‘Inside every antagonist, there’s a protagonist waiting to come out’ ( obviously a variant of the saying ‘inside every fat person, there’s a slim person trying to come out’).
The antagonist, of course, makes the story nearly as much as the protagonist. If you have a weak or insufficiently motivated antagonist, it massively detracts from the tension, and tension, as so many advisors on writing craft constantly hammer home, forms the main interest of a plot.
Of course, an antagonist does not have to be evil or wrongly motivated. An antagonist can just be someone on the other side about a particular issue, and have strong arguments for doing the things s/he does to frustrate the will of the protagonist. Then, the situation can be as true to life as it often isn’t, when the rights and wrongs of a situation are wholly clear cut, with the baddies writ large – though reading about that sort of situation has its own appeal.
I have often thought how in Shakespeare – with the exception of his early, unfair depiction of Joan of Arc – part of his outstanding greatness is his capacity to depict everyone’s point of view fairly.
[image error]For instance, this is true of one of his greatest antagonists, Edmund in ‘King Lear’. He is shown to be motivated in his appalling villainies and his determination to usurp his legitimate brother’s place, by Gloucester’s insensitive treatment of him, leading to his obsessive jealousy of Edgar. Gloucester even jokes coarsely about his mother in front of him to the Duke of Kent. Then Gloucester adds that he has been abroad and will be sent away again…
At the end of the play, on hearing how Goneril and Regan have died through their rivalry over him, he says, ‘Yet Edmund was beloved’. That is a tragic phrase; it shows what underlay his dismal scheming and brutality. He trusted no-one; but he had a great neglected need to be loved.
Tybalt in ‘Romeo and Juliet’ is often described as the antagonist, and his motivation appears to be more simple than as so often in Shakespeare. He seems to be merely violent, and to hate the rival family unthinkingly.
An antagonist can be honest but misguided, or charming but flawed, or an estranged former ally. What s/he does have to be – even if s/he isn’t a person, but an impersonal force like the weather or a societal rule – is strongly motivated and a fit adversary for the protagonist.
It can be difficult to enjoy a book when you wholly side with the Antagonist, as I did with Mary Renault’s books about Theseus. There, the Antagonist is female power as personified in the Great Mother, and I was very sorry that Theseus as the personification of patriarchy inevitably triumphed as regards power. He did not, of course, triumph as regards his personal life, ending up an empty shell after the sacrificial death of his Apostate Amazon and his murder of his wife Phaedra (incidentally, that was an astoundingly inefficient choke that he used; done efficiently it should have rendered her unconscious in ten seconds appproximately, not in minutes; but that’s the Sportsfighter in me speaking) .
Then there is the story where the Antagonist can triumph – the Anti Hero, and the one where the Protagonist is his or her own Antagonist. Perhaps s/he does things under an unconscious influence or is even haunted by his own Doppleganger; as In ‘Dr. Jeklyl and Mr. Hide’ and the main character in Chuck Palanhuik’s ‘Fight Club’.
Sometimes, an antagonist truly makes a series, for some readers at least, becoming a favourite character.
I remember when I read ‘The Mortal Instruments’ to my daughter, I never thought the later books were the same after the larger than life antagonist Valentine was killed off. I found his habit of jumping through a portal with a contemptuous jibe a brilliant feature (besides, I was sad that he was never depicted as repenting before going to his final account).
[image error]On entertaining Antagonists, I recommend Rannie in Robert Wingfield’s ‘The Legend of Dan’ series. I do relish an Antagonist with a sense of humour. Also, there is Harpalycus in Rebecca Lochlann’s ‘Child of the Erinyes’ series. He is so foul it is funny, and he revels in his wickedness. What he most keenly relishes, after many centuries of body hopping, is causing as much misery as he can on the three main characters, Aridela and her two rival lovers. [image error]
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I have said before, that sometimes the Antagonist is unfortunately more interesting or even more sympathetic than the Protagonist , and even if s/he fails to win the lead characters’ love, or take over the world – or whatever it is s/he wants to do –the said Antagonist anyway takes over the book.
This is what I felt about Clement Willoughby (the original of Jane Austen’s own beguiling Willoughby, perhaps –as we know from Mary’s quotes from Evelina that Jane Austen had read it). He is far more entertaining than the sententious Lord Orville, and protests eternal devotion to suspicious heroine, the problem being that he never quite gets round to proposing and makes the occasional half-hearted effort to abduct her.
[image error]On Jane Austen, I never thought that Wickham was quite up to the part. That may just be me, and perhaps a villain of that sort doesn’t need much strong motivation, and just drifts from one self-indulgent escapade and heartless seduction to the next. While general hatred towards Mr. Darcy is part of his motivation, it isn’t somehow made convincing, and his seduction of Lydia is just part of his general self indulgence rather than something he is strongly motivated, though it does further the plot. I suppose this weakness, this tendency to undertake mean schemes and then to be bought off from them, is meant to be all part of his villainy, but somehow he is a disappointing villain.
Another interesting point, to return to what I said at the beginning of this post, is the fact that sometimes exactly who is a Protagonist and who an Antagonist can be unclear. It can even depend on perspective, as according to the point of view, their roles can be interchangeable. It is to a particular example of this that I return in my next post.
