Lucinda Elliot's Blog, page 3

Review of ‘Swimming in the Rainbow’ by Rebecca Lochlann

I thought that the fireworks and thunderclaps of the climatic end to the former theme of this series would make it a hard act to follow.

I was happy to find myself proved wrong.

The reader doesn’t need to worry. Though the action in this concluding instalment starts on a minor key, the dramatic tension and emotional intensity build up piece by piece, like an orchestra readying for the dramatic finale of a symphony. The action here is excellently paced, the tensions exploding into a drama every bit as gripping as the story arc in the earlier books.

Zoë lives in an isolated castle or fortified manor house in the forested mountains Germany of the year 2090. This is approximately eighteen years after the dramatic conclusion of the epic struggle between the reincarnated personalities of the former Aridela, Menoetius and Chrysaleon of the Bronze Age.

In this era, after the upheavals, violence, war, catastrophic depopulation and environmental destruction of the previous age, outside the domed cities, the world has largely reverted to the technology – and to some extent, the class structure– of a former age. The population seems to be in terminal decline.

Deprived of the company of other young people, raised by a mother with some nervous problem, a loutish and unfeeling father, a remote tutor and a group of servants, the girl takes refuge in a world of fantasy centred about a friend who lives secretly in the Schloss. She calls this friend  Teófilo, and confides all her thoughts to him.

He communicates to her a magic world, and she shared with him her passionate, precocious love of her favourite Victorian era author. She has a book of his poems with a photograph, and he is her idol.

Teófilo is protective of her. The advice he gives her is often strangely wise, if it has been made up only by herself. Other parts of it are mixed with her fantasy world:

“Blow the bubbles,” he whispered. “One of these days, one will—” “Yes, yes, wrap round you without breaking. I’ve heard this before.” “Transform me into the one who can grant your every desire.”

Zoë instinctively communicates with nature as well, particularly with trees. She is soothed by their ancient wisdom.

Then, one day, this life is shattered by an armed attack. Cannon damages the castle.  Far worse, it ends Zoë’s childhood and destroys her only friend Teófilo.

She soon learns from her brutally indifferent father and rambling mother that although she is only twelve, she must leave home and entrust her future to a man she has never met before, a man of whom her parents are terrified. This is all part of the price of some arrangement that she never heard of.

It is, however, a relief to her that he reminds her irresistibly of her favourite poet.

They travel by horseback through a Germany largely reverting to a pastoral landscape. They are always pursued by their enemies:

‘We slipped through the dark like wolves, stealthily, our guards’ knives intermittently catching the gleam of moonlight like a wolf’s teeth.’

Somewhere near the borders they come on the ruins of one of the concentration camps of Nazi Germany:

‘Because the trees on the west side of this clearing were thinner and leafless, and a lot of the grey wall toppled into low piles of rubble, I could see almost all of the area it once contained. Wind keened softly as it blew through an inner fence made of solid posts and barbed wire. Two fences. Had they kept something in, or out?’

Zoë is only later to understand that this is the ruined remains of a concentration camp. This past genocide the ruin represents are symbolic of the later slaughter in the time so much closer to Zoë’s, and the horrors that the future might yet hold, if the wrong choices are made.

It is only when they reach her final refuge that Zoë gradually begins to understand how she is a key part of the future of the world

Zoë realises how her own story links with that of the struggle of the Erinyes, of the story of Erin Aragon. The struggle the Erinyes initiated is still incomplete:   the forces controlling women’s destiny have yet to be overcome.

I was delighted not to be disappointed with this concluding episode to the Erinyes Series. It is as cohesive, as flowing in style, as page turning as the previous episodes, and if anything, the word pictures are even more evocative. There is, as others say, a poetic feel to the prose.

The new set of characters – I won’t write a spoiler and say if any of the old ones make an appearance – are as gripping and complex as the former ones.

 If I have a complaint, it is an unreasonable one: I did miss the comic evil of Harpalycus. But his role in the epic, like that of the former Aridela, Menoetius and Chrysaleon, is complete. Besides,  and there is a pretty impressive villain.

The Inner Life of Characters in Classic Early Novels – Some Musings on Rinaldo Rinaldini and Richardson

Recently, I did some reading, and re-reading of several ‘classic’ novels of varying merit. These included Joseph Conrad’s ‘The Heart of Darkness’ – a brilliant classic which should be appreciated in all the complexity of its moral vision  – Elizabeth Gaskell – generally very good, sometimes brilliant, often uneven. Also, Christian Auguste Vulpius – an early groundbreaking novelist, melodramatic beyond belief, but certainly capable of delivering a stirring read, often of the So Bad It’s Good Variety and also Charles Garvice – vastly inferior to them all, generally purely terrible, though occasionally stirred into delivering a decent passage or two.

This got me on to thinking about the whole issue of what you might call the mental life of characters. Is this a modern phenomenon?

Gaskell, in fact, remarks in ‘Sylvia’s Lovers’ (Sorry, everyone; here I go again, quoting ‘Sylvia’s Lovers’ ; have I got a share in the royalties or something?) that self awareness, self analysis, is a comparatively modern concept (it is also, of course, to some extent connected with personality; but that is a different matter). She was far closer in time to the era of the French Revolutionary Wars in which she sets this novel than we are, of course, and she has some memory of the mindset of the generations who preceded her. Their approach to life was then, markedly different from that of the ‘educated’ people of her own day.

Her character Philip Hepburn, is self-aware – in fact, quite self-conscious in the uncomfortable sense of the word – whereas the other characters in the novel are not.

It is an irony that reflective as he is, Philip Hepburn still behaves dishonourably. That compared to modern people of a comparable intelligence he is on the whole less aware of himself and his motivation probably saves him from less stress and moral conflict than a modern thinking person in the same position would suffer.

She saw this lack of reflectiveness as an aspect of this former age, and suggests that our increasing self-awareness is not necessarily accompanied by a gain in superior moral insight, though it is accompanied by a general decrease in spontaneity, of exuberance, of vivid existence in the present. Presumably Philip Hepburn is meant to be an indication of this. His love interest the unthinking Sylvia, and his bitter rival the exuberant, opportunistic Charley Kinraid, are presumably meant to be of the old, extroverted type of personality.

This is a fascinating insight. When novels began to be written, as often as not in the author offered very little in the way of a character with a mental life. I admit that I haven’t yet read Sterne – but did read somewhere ( as I said earlier, geek or what?) that a lack of consistency of character and internal dialogue are drawbacks to his writing.

For instance, in Vulpius’ sensational story ‘Rinaldo Rinaldini’ (for which he claims a moral basis, which I find questionable or decidedly unexamined) we do not hear much of the hero’s thoughts. We are told that he is anguished by his having drifted into a life as the ‘Captain of Bandits’ (that translation does make me laugh; it sounds like the Captain of the First Eleven!), and that he is given to dismal reflection on it, especially after he meets and falls in love with the virtuous Aurelia (and with good reason; when she finds out who he is, she screams and faints).

He does go in for some moral reflection on his situation – but typically, these are expressed externally, as in the dialogue I quoted in my recent blog post on the novel; for instance, he sings a song, accompanying himself by guitar, about this moral quandary (I assume he is meant to have written this as a lament rather than to clarify his feelings).

Before going on, I have to give a bit of background and say that one of the inconsistencies of this story is the time frame. From the point of view of Rinaldo and his fellow robbers, only a short while has passed between his finding out that Aurelia’s great uncle, alarmed at her having come to know him, has had her sent on her way to join a convent, and his coming on her as a bitterly unhappily married and disillusioned wife to the wicked Count Rozzio. From her point of view, months at least have passed.

Rinaldo had positioned his men to abduct her, but instead they had to fight off encroaching government troops, who decimated the robber band. Shortly after this he took up with the devoted gypsy girl Rosalia and meeting with the few survivors of his old band, set up a new one while continuing to protest that he wished to escape the country and his way of life.

Then finding an unhappily married Aurelia in Baron Rozzio’s nearby castle (there are lots of convenient co-incidences in this tale), he is insulted by the wicked count and his toadies and swears revenge. Although they evidently live in different time schemes, this doesn’t stop Rinaldo from deciding to free Auerelia at once and he sets his men on the castle.

As usual, when the men who have previously treated him with contempt discover who he is, they fall on their knees. Aurelia swoons, and on recovering consciousness, pleads with him to be ‘As kind as you are terrible. Deal with me honourably…Abuse not your power, nor make my yet unspotted name the jest of mankind.’

One assumes from this that she is concerned that Rinaldini might abduct her by force, and one wonders if he did intend that, as his response is to sigh: ‘Now I feel what I am!” Typically, we aren’t told exactly what his plans were, if he, a man of action rather than thought, knows himself.

Anyway, that told him! He does what Aurelia asks and takes her to her mother in a nearby convent. He always declares that he worships Aurelia’s virtue as distinct from his own wickedness, but we wonder at times how far Vulpius intends this declaration to be sincere. Because the character’s inner life, such as it is, is so sketchy, we have no idea. We may assume that the fact that Aurelia’s great uncle the hermit Donato tells Rinaldini, ‘You cannot love her in an honourable way, and your love is a crime…’ is a pointer, but the cursory and uneven portrayal of character in this novel makes it difficult to tell.

An ugly incident when Rinaldo’s men sack Rozzio’s castle shows his opinion of how women who are not virtuous (or anyway, virtuous with anyone but him) should be treated; he gives the Count’s former concubines, who have been invited to live at the castle and have insulted Aurelia, ‘to his men’ as the equivalent of war prizes.

He goes off to indulge in his earthy relationship with his willing slave Rosalia, who doesn’t seem all that troubled by loving the chief of a band of brigands except when she finds that she is pregnant (this difficulty is got over by the poor girl’s subsequent miscarriage). She never expects him to marry her and he never offers. Perhaps her status isn’t sufficient to tempt him, though he was originally a goat-herd himself.

This scene is typical both of the melodrama of this novel, and the fact that if indeed it does have a moral purpose the author claims in his preface, it fails. The whole question of Rinaldo Rinaldini’s realisation of his own degradation and brutalisation in his life as a bandit is dealt with too cursorily and as asides, though usually in terms of high drama. For instance he exclaims as he looks at the dawn: –
‘Even on me the golden sun (said he) bestows his light; on me, as on all men, whether good or bad; on me, to whom his beneficient rays are as a lightning flash, threatening destruction on my guilty conscience.’

This piece of poesy doesn’t prevent him from shortly afterwards holding a pistol to the breast of the unfortunate Marchioness who has suggested, not knowing who she speaks to, that Rinaldini is a coward, and demanding ‘The trifling sum of a hundred sequins’ or from giving Count Rozzio’s unfortunate courtesans as war prizes to his men (we never hear any more about them; we may assume that the author of this moral novel thought that as they were women of easy virtue, it didn’t matter particularly if they were raped).

Rinaldo is increasingly shown as attempting to escape from his life as a bandit – but some chance meeting or co-incidence always brings him back to that course of life.

As this novel progresses, this sabotaging of the brigand hero’s plans for escaping to a new and blameless life becomes almost ludicrous. The Old Man of Fronteja comes constantly to pop up as presumably, the physical manifestation of Rinaldo’s conscience. He wants him to fulfil his destiny and become a military hero.

Whether intentionally or not, these recurrent manifestations become ludicrous, and one is put in mind of some pantomime character.

We begin to feel that he is somehow sabotaging himself through unconscious motivation, though of course, such psychologizing was completely outside the mindset of early writers of ‘Penny Dreadfuls’. Characters were made to have certain goals but to be pushed in contrary directions by fate or divine will or for that matter, the author’s own will, as reflected in the requirements of the plot.

Another lady-love of Rinaldo’s, Dianora, also screams and faints when she finds out who he is (she has just found out that she is pregnant but like Rosalia, miscarries).

This dramatic moment is in fact illustrated by a wonderfully tacky illustration in the book, and as I have said before, I wish I had a scanner to show it in this post).

At once point Rinaldo does have a brief respite in escape to a quiet island where by chance he meets his beloved Dianora (the unfortunate Rosalia is now dead). He becomes able to shed tears and pray, and she is convinced that as he is now becoming ‘a good man’ she should forgive him, but malign fate brings about another attack from government troops. In no time he is loading his pistols again, determined to fight it out from a cave, and finally exasperated at his recidivism, his tormenting mentor and first tutor, The Old Man of Fonteja, tries to stab him to death…

Interestingly, a much earlier novel – Samuel Richardson’s ‘Pamela’ has a far more self conscious and reflective narrative viewpoint, that of the beleaguered heroine. We never find out much about the thought processes of Mr B, except that he suddenly and dramatically has a conversion towards respecting her spiritual integrity as well  as coveting her body, and that from then on he treats her as an angel rather than a whore. Thankfully, we are spared whatever scanty mental processes take place in his head, but we are told in the sequel, ‘Pamela In Her exalted Condition’ that he didn’t really intend to rape her when he held her down on the bed with the assistance of the wicked Mrs Jewkes, or leaped out of cupboards – it was all a misunderstanding.  I see; well, if his readership could swallow that piece of mendacity, they were capable of believing anything, including that ‘the reformed rake makes the best husband’.

I am far from unusual in finding both the heroine’s moral outlook and that of the author one of self-serving hypocrisy – she is quite happy to put herself into the hands of her tormentor, putative seducer and would be rapist, the arch rogue Mr B, once their relationship is put on a nominally respectable basis – but my point is, that there were very few novels with a purported moral lesson which even in this period, did depict moral reflection and also, a self-aware protagonist. Richardson’s are unusual. In his subsequent, and far less clumsy novel ‘Clarissa’ this moral reflectiveness was refined almost to the pitch of an art form.

Vulpius’ novel is an exciting read (which Pamela, despite Mr B’s habit of springing from closets, is not) but in the absence of the balance of a detached viewpoint, his aim to stir the reader’s blood detracts from any plausible moral values becoming clear. Even apart from that, Rinaldo is a strangely ambivalent and patchy character, passionate without depth, and lurid without being vividly human. The work, then, makes a fascinating example of the blunt techniques of the early novelist as regards character development, somewhat refined by Richardson and then transformed by the human and sympathetic heroines of Jane Austen.

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Inspired Endings – That State of Transendence

I have written before about the inspired ending to Patrick Hamilton’s ‘The Slaves of Solitude’, which is, along with ‘Hangover Square’ considered to be his masterpiece.

I won’t do it justice here,  unless I explain something of the story, which is essentially a dark comedy. It concerns the grim – and often ludicrous – experiences of the lonely, early middle aged Miss Roach in a Henley boarding house called – with a typical Hamilton facetious touch – ‘The Rosamund Tea Rooms’ – in England during 1942; in other words, in the middle of World War II.

She incurs the wholly unjustified vindictiveness of two of her fellow lodgers. One of these is a German woman, Vicki Kugelmann, whom she has previously tried to befriend, the other a type which I gather was common in the ‘genteel’ boarding houses of the era – the impossibly overbearing and reactionary Mr Thwaites. They encourage each other in taunting Miss Roach, and gibing at her support for democracy.

Miss Roach has developed a mild flirtation with an American GI, the generous but unreliable Lieutenant Pike,who wishes, if he survives the war, to enter the laundry business. He has even proposed to Miss Roach: ‘Though she had laughed at the laundry, she had never entirely discounted it’.

The predatory Vikki, taken along to a meal with Lieutenant Pike and some of his GI friends through Miss Roach’s charity, throws herself at the unreliable, drunken Lieutenant Pike, and contrives to come between him and Miss Roach and to steal him as ‘her American’, though she smugly informs Miss Roach that:  ‘I am not the Snatcher. I do not snatch the men’.

Then Miss Roach, already feeling undermined through the constant sniping comments from Mr Thwaites and Vikki, hears that Lieutenant Pike in fact is notorious for going about proposing to every woman with whom he becomes entangled, so his previous proposal was empty. She feels; ‘deprived of all dignity’.

Vikki gradually reveals herself as hating the British, and Mr Thwaites has always been a closet fascist. After a prolonged psychological battle with these two, Miss Roach finally emerges triumphant.

Lieutenant Pike shifts his allegiance back to Miss Roach, but has to leave when his unit is transferred. Having inherited a sum of money from her aunt, she leaves the boarding house in triumph. Mr Thwaites has now died of a sudden agonising illness  –  and Vicki has been asked to leave to boarding house for inviting Mr Thwaites and Lieutenant Pyke into her room in a drunken spree.

Miss Roach is invited  to see the retired actor Mr Prest – always despised as ‘common’ in the Rosamund Tea Rooms – brought out of retirement to star as the wicked uncle in a pantomime. This, and the delight of the childish audience, gives Miss Roach a feeling of transcendence: ‘There was an extraordinary look of purification about Mr Prest..and…Miss Roach felt purified.’

She has taken a room for a couple of nights in Claridges (able to pay through her small inheritance from her aunt): Here her strange feeling of purification continues:

‘An orchestra was now playing in the lounge, and sitting and having that last drink…something else was added to Miss Roache’s state of mind…there came a sort of clarification of mind, in which she could see in their correct proportions all the things which had occurred to her in the last few months…

She saw Mr Thwaites in his right proportions…The trouble with that man was that he had never stepped beyond the mental age of eleven or twelve, nature having arrested him at a certain ugly phase…

She saw the Lieutenant in his right proportions. Not strong of mind, easily affected by drink, in a foreign land, in a mood of sexual excitation, in fear of the future and over anxious to live life to the full, the poor man had gone about in drink making love to the girls and asking them to marry him…

She saw Vikki in her right proportions. A wretched woman that, more wretched than evil…savagely egoistic. And in her sex obsession, vain. And in her vanity cruel…She probably wasn’t really the concentration camp, stadium yelling, rich, fruity, German Nazi which Miss Roach had at times thought her (and yet she very probably was!) and now Miss Roach found it easy to forgive her.’

Settling down to sleep, Miss Roach, ‘That slave of her task master, solitude …hopefully composed her mind for sleep – God help us, God help all of us, every one, all of us.’

Patrick Hamilton was in fact an atheist, but if ever a line was written in a state of inspiration, that last line of supplication to the Deity is it.

To me, the feeling that it inspires sums up the state of mind in which the author must be himself or herself, in order to inspire that same leap of transcendence in the reader.

This is the culmination of that satisfactory ending. We’ve had the fireworks, and we’ve done the prosaic stuff with tying up the loose ends.Now you must impart to the reader a feeling  of peace and completion.

This is the culmination; this is where you leave the reader who has paid you the compliment of joining you in a sojourn through your imaginary world. You must leave that reader contented.

In a fictional work that has any aspirations to merit, that moment of parting is all important. .

You can’t afford to leave that reader dissatisfied. Unless you are writing a series, in those last pages,  you must tie up those loopholes in the plot, that goes without saying. You must resolve your main characters’ dilemma, end that quest, bring down those barriers .
You have to bring about completion as surely as any conveyancing solicitor handing the client those coveted house keys.

And evocation of mood is a great part of it.

In light novels, say a romance pure and simple, you only aim to solve the main characters’ dilemma and bring them together. It is that which gives the reader her (less often his) emotional high. It’s ended nicely, for those protagonists, anyway.

But if you are writing something deeper, that is hardly enough. You want to evoke a more expanded mindset that that. You want that reader to feel almost stunned and emotionally both drained and fulfilled, by first the drama of those concluding chapters, and then to come to a sense of peace.

I’m not, of course, implying that we can hope to come even close, were we to write and rewrite our ending lines several thousand times,  but below are the ending lines to ‘King Lear’.

Cordelia is dead, Edmund’s repentance when he found himself dying after his fight with Edgar wasn’t in time to save her; the once foolish, vain and authoritarian King Lear, who has run mad and been restored to sanity again by that rejected daughter, has himself died of a cracked heart; Goneril has poisoned Regan, and then stabbed herself to death, and ‘My poor Fool is hanged’.

The slaughter is awful. It is given to Edgar (the probable future ruler) to say:

‘The weight of this sad time we must obey;
Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.
The oldest hath borne most; we that are young
Shall never see so much, nor live so long.’

It wouldn’t even be a good idea if we could replicate that tragic grandeur. It is probably better for the mental stability of the population that we don’t read several such great works of literature each week. We would become overwrought.

For all that, we must, of course, always try to write the best version of whatever it is that we are writing or we won’t be aiming high enough: we’ll be churning out pot boilers.

There are some writers who have managed to do that and produce something of lasting value – I would argue that Conan Doyle in his Sherlock Holmes stories achieved that, however light a value he placed on them – but they have not been many.

But if we want to write something of value, then at the conclusion of a story, that feeling of transcendence, that mindset of rising above petty differences, of compassionate awareness of the tragedies in life – of the terrible waste in human misunderstanding, must come through.

When I first finished reading ‘Wuthering Heights’ – a good long time ago, and read the concluding passage:

‘I lingered round them, under that benign sky; watched the moths fl uttering among the heath, and hare-bells; listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass; and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.’

Those evocative words gave me that feeling.

That was as myself in a transcendent mood.

Later, when I came to think about it, having reverted once more my everyday self – I decided that I personally found the ending of the story unsatisfactory because Healthcliff never repents of his evildoing – he explicitly tells Nelly Dean that he has done nothing wrong.

I have learnt since, that Emily Bronte had given much thought to the final destination of the ‘unrepentant man of iron’. Now I would hazard that the ending is not meant to give any definitive indication of what that final account will be, other than at the last, we are all perhaps incorporated into that all encompassing peace.

And, of course, with regard to all the above,  if you are writing a series, then that job is in some ways even harder, as in each stage, you must have an interim ending which gives a partial sense of completion and then finish with the fireworks and the roll of drums and then – that final piece of imaginative empathy.

Well, that is what we must aim for. We can only try.

Structure in Novel Writing, James Scott Bell’s ‘Write Your Novel From the Middle’ and a Certain Way to a Unique Writing Voice – Joy In Writing.

I am sure there is a lot of happiness mixed up with the anxiety, in this elopment…

I read something the other day that made me think (unaccustomed exercise: new pathways created, and all that).

It was actually in an intriguing book about how useful the novel (excuse that Freudian slip) approach of ‘writing a book from the middle’ is, in giving a clear, effortless structure. This is, in fact, a book full of a good advice on structure for every sort of writer. It can be applied by those who begin writing with only the vaguest plan –(I am one of those, in good company with Stephen King) – for those who plan their novels like a military campaign, and for those who are in  between.

In fact, I would recommend this book, which explains how if you have the strong core at the centre of a book (a bit like Pilates for wordsmiths, I suppose) then the rest of it can hold up.

It’s ‘Write Your Novel From the Middle’ by James Scott Bell Compendium Press (2014).

The author quotes various massively successful novels which have, for all their superficially rambling, epic nature, that ‘Magical Midpoint Moment’ that gives structure and coherence to the whole. This, he suggests, applies to films as well as novels of all genres.  He quotes ‘Gone With The Wind’ and ‘Casablanca’ as two perennially successful examples of stories with a watertight core. He quotes ‘The Hunger Games’ as another example (I am still meaning to read that, though I have seen the film).

This intrigued me. I was interested enough to pick up some of my favourite novels – Margaret Attwood’s ‘Bodily Harm’ and Elizabeth Gaskell’s ‘Sylvia’s Lovers’ were two – and in fact, the conflict that lies at the base of both plots is indeed at the centre of the novels.

I have gone into both in depth elsewhere, so no need to repeat myself in detail about that conflict here. But briefly: –

In ‘Sylvia’s Lovers’ there is a discussion between the heroine’s parents about the rumoured fickleness of her preferred, stimulating, but supposedly dead lover and the dogged devotion of her still living cousin, whom she finds dull. This really, is the core of the novel. Which one will bring her long term happiness (if either)? Perhaps neither truly can, if the one whose devotion she hardly notices is too dull to excite her, while the other hero of her fantasy might be just that – an externalisation of all her ideal qualities in a man projected onto one faulty human being, with a questionable past…

In ‘Bodily Harm’ we have this: ‘Paul smiles: a kindly, threatening smile. “I like you,” he says. “I guess I’m trying to tell you not to get too mixed up in local politics.”’ And there it is the crux of the meaning of the novel. Rennie is a journalist who writes superficial ‘lifestyle’ magazine articles, and who, after some devastating real life experiences, decides to ‘escape from it all’ on a working holiday in a little known Carribean island; here she gets drawn into local politics willy nilly.

I  couldn’t resist looking at one of my own novels, my first,  ‘That Scoundrel Ėmile Dubois’ to check the middle. Sure enough, there at about the centre, we have the anti hero taking his bride Sophie to their newly rented house after the wedding ceremony.

There, waiting to greet her, along with other staff members, are their new butler and housekeeper Mr and Mrs Kit. It just so happens that they are former associates of his in his old career as the highwayman Monsieur Giles. Ėmile is an incorrigible scoundrel yet – in fact, potentially a far worse one, for he has been possibly infected with the vampire virus – and Sophie sees that she will live in a household (with the exception of Agnes, her maid) run by his former disreputable cronies whose first loyalties are to him. She is uneasy about that, without knowing why…

…But, she doesn’t run off. She’s too besotted; besides, she knows underneath that she is going to stay and fight to bring out the best in the rascal.

I was – of course – pleased to find the story has a strong core, in fact, done unconsciously. Perhaps, the unconscious sometimes tidies up those issues which the conscious neglects?

I am not saying that novel doesn’t arguably have other faults in its composition. Some find the plot too complex, for instance.

Anyway,  that was a novel I particularly loved writing. I have loved the actual writing part of all my novels (I have whinged often enough about how I hate the editing), but that one – it was, to quote a silly pop song, ‘like flying without wings’. It was a joy ride in the best sense.

And that brings me on to a point the author of ‘Write Your Novel From the Middle’ makes: ‘When an author is joyous in the telling, it pulses through the words…Because when you’re joyful in the writing, the writing is fresher and fuller. Fuller of what? Of you. and that translates to the page and becomes that thing called Voice.’

And isn’t a distinctive voice what makes a novel stand out?

I would love to write like Margaret Attwood. I am going to repeat that: I would love to write like Margaret Attwood! But I  never will  write like Margaret Attwood.  I can only  write as the best Lucinda Elliot possible, and the only way to do that is to write what I love.

What happens to people who write what they don’t love is illustrated all too clearly in the case of the writer Patrick Hamilton.

The contrast between the wonderful vigour of his early works, such as the trilogy ‘Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky’ and the tragic comic grandeur of his vision in his masterpieces, ‘Hangover Square’ and ‘The Slaves of Solitude’ and the sour impression left by last work, ‘Mr Stimpson and Mr Gorse’ is painfully obvious.

Hamilton had lost, not only his faith in people and the progress of history, had not only descended into alcoholism and bouts of depression, but also his joy in writing.

It is not that he wrote about some very unpleasant people in ‘Mr Stimpson and Mr Gorse’; because he always wrote about mainly unpleasant people.  However, before his last novels, he also had at least one admirable, or anyway, sympathetic and well meaning character at the centre of the story. Besides that, he portrayed the absurdities, snobberies,  bigotories and impossible behaviour of the others so humorously that one was left with a sense of being uplifted.

Not only that: in his earlier books, there is always what he called ‘the country dance’ where the reader is truly inspired, and sees – along with the admirable character who is always there at the core of the novel  – that life has its joyful side.

In his later novels, the portrayal of that decent person is weaker and weaker, and finally, in ‘Mr Stimpson and Mr Gorse’  it is actually lacking. He had forgotten that the normal reader wishes to be left with a feeling of having been ‘brought out of himself or herself’ as well as bieng wryly amused.

Had he, with his massive talent, only somehow kept in touch with that joy, he could have avoided that dying fall.

We must remember to write with joy. And that, by the way, is my true answer to a blog post I wrote maybe a year ago, about a novice writer friend of mine who was devastated by her first one star review (and I am still proud I did not say in reply ‘How nice to have only one of those: would you care to count how many I have?’ ).

One should ignore unfair criticism (just criticism with some basis for it is a different matter; we should take a lot of notice of that) and go on in revelling in the joy of writing. There will always be detractors, and anything that stands out must come under fire, but the best way to treat that is to keep on having joy in what you create.

Interview of Harley Venn, Anti-Hero of ‘The Villainous Viscount’ by a Modern Interviewer…

 

Interviewer (trying hard not to stare at the anti-hero’s startling golden and athletic looks):  Lord Venn – that is the correct form of address for a viscount, I believe – it is a pleasure to meet you.

Harley Venn (stooping to kiss her hand):  Charmed, Ma’am. You may call me anything you like, and I’d forgive you. The pleasure is entirely mine, I assure you. ..Then, in your age, delicate females are allowed to interview such abandoned rascals as myself? That is careless of your male relatives: I’m of a mind to warn them.

Interviewer [repressing a smile]: There is no need to go to that trouble.  I wouldn’t let my male relatives interfere in my work as a journalist.

Harley Venn):  I wouldn’t let any sister of mine go and talk alone with a fellow with my reputation  – or lack of it. But no more of that: — to the interview, then, Ma’am:  I am obliged to meet Jack Molyneux and some fellow pugilists for a bout at midday.

[The interviewer starts, and they both glance round at a clap of thunder and a flash of lightning).

Harley Venn: Don’t trouble about that: it’s only the family curse, and don’t affect you.  But come closer anyway, Ma’am, so I can protect you from that damned Hooded Skeleton- beg pardon: you can see I’m not used to respectable female company. – You see, I thought I caught a glimpse of the filthy thing over there by the window. It is a mass hallucination merely, but it might scare you.

Interviewer (smiling wryly): That is kind of you, Lord Venn, but I’ll stay over here…Rumour has it that there is a curse on the males of the Venn family: that must be alarming.

Harley Venn:  Not just us, at that.  My friend Molyneux’s old governor, who was a great friend of my Uncle Toby, came to a sticky end besides, and then my uncle’s former steward was squashed flat as a pancake when lightning struck a wall next to him. Soon after that, young Carstair’s great-uncle was found dead hanging by the heels from the eaves of his country house.

Interviewer:  Oh dear.

 Harley Venn:  But I still hold that it is all a series of conjuring tricks, myself, and maybe a touch of mass mesmerism, or some such tomfoolery.

Interviewer:  Mesmerism? ah, of course: hypnosis.    

Harley Venn [laughs carelessly]:   But don’t you know I’ve enlisted the aid of a Professor of Magic, Marksmanship, Swordmanship, Languages and Subtle Influences to sort matters out? I don’t credit the tricky rogue will solve anything, but Molyneux and young Carstairs were set on hiring the fellow. [More seriously] Besides, I need to protect my betrothed.  

Interviewer:  Ah, yes, I hear your lordship is recently engaged to the niece of your late uncle’s steward, the man who was killed by that lightning strike.

Harley Venn:  ‘Venn’ will do: charming creatures such as yourself don’t need to address me formally…Yes, I am recently engaged to Miss Clarinda Greendale. She’s a fine girl. You probably heard she didn’t have much choice in the matter, being compromised by me. Taradiddles, of course. The fact is, the poor girl got tangled up in it when old enemy of mine set some hired bravoes on me.  She helped see ‘em off, using her parasol.  But then she was caught out alone in the house with me, and that was it for her fair fame, no matter if I was half conscious.  

Interviewer [sternly]:  You were rumoured to have a list of heiresses as prospective brides.

Harley Venn [winks):  Was I, Ma’am? True enough, Miss Greendale turned me down before, giving me some hard words while she was about it, but no matter, that is in the past.

Interviewer:  Perhaps she had some doubts about your character?

Harley Venn [grins]:  No, Ma’am, she had no doubts about my character at all, knowing me to be a good-for-nothing, brawling, drinking, gambling, wenching racal.

Interviewer [feebly] Well, I wish you both very happy.

Harley Venn:  I thank you. She’s a fine girl, as I say, and she’s got nerves of iron. There’s no doubt there’s no doubt she can keep her head.  Those old fellows who let a series of theatrical tricks put ‘em in their graves couldn’t. We’ll see off this so-called family curse together.

[With a brisk tapping, O’Hare, Harley Venn’s rascally manservant, opens the door.] 

O’Hare: Them dunns is back again.

Interviewer:  Dunns? Oh yes, debt collectors.

Harley Venn:  Don’t trouble me with such minor matters, O’Hare. Can’t you see I am giving an interview to publicise the book about me? You know what to do: have your brats give ‘em the welcome we always save for fellows whining about payment. 

O’Hare: And I cannot for the life of me get credit anywhere in the neighbourhood for the wine, neither.

Harley Venn: Then go outside the neighbourhood:  say I sent you.

O’Hare: They say all over Town that your sending me is why they won’t give me credit.

Harley Venn: Insolent rogues! I’d best search about for some spare tin about the house. Be off with you, O’Hare, you rascal, and look for some yourself…My apologies, Ma’am, for involving you in this domestic trivia. I hoped to offer you a glass of wine at least, and it turns out we can‘t get a drop. Some coffee, perhaps? Or someone left some cordial somewhere, from when I was getting the better of that beating.

Interviewer [rises]:  No, really, Lord Venn, don’t trouble, I must be on my way. –- Thank you for doing this interview with me, and I wish you every success with doing away with the Curse of the Venns.

O’Hare [to himself as he goes out] He’ll need it.

Heathcliff – No Romantic Hero: Vengeance and Forgiveness in ‘Wuthering Heights’.

I have recently been reading Marianne Thormählen’s fascinating book ‘The Brontës and Religion’ (Cambridge University Press 1999).

I shouldn’t be. Really, I should be doing more research,  but I couldn’t resist it.

I came across it through its mention in the notes of the 1994 Wordsworth Classic Edition of ‘The Tenant of Wildfell Hall’ as containing a good discussion of Anne Brontë’s belief in universal salvation. Having as usual glanced ahead at certain portions, I expect it to provide the key to certain puzzles and ambiguities in the depiction of evil and the development of character in the Brontë sister’s novels.

For instance, as I have said in blog posts elsewhere, I have always been surprised at the widespread and I think, wholly mistaken view that Heathcliff is meant to be a romantic figure (for all his depiction in many films).

Once, in an energetic mood, some years ago, I even entered into a discussion about this on Goodreads. There. a startling number of readers coming to ‘Wuthering Heights’ for the first time, assured me that I was entirely mistaken, and that I ought to read the book yet again, confident that I would immediately see that Heathcliff is a misunderstood romantic hero.

I know that Emily Brontë reflected in her poems an interest in the final fate of the unrepentant evil doer, and it may well be that her depiction of Heathcliff is influenced by that. He goes wholly unrepentant to his grave. Notoriously, when Nelly Dean advises him to send for a clergyman, comes this exchange: –

  ‘You are aware, Mr. Heathcliff,’ I said, ‘that from the time you were thirteen years old you have lived a selfish, unchristian life; and probably hardly had a Bible in your hands during all that period.   You must have forgotten the contents of the book, and you may not have space to search it now.   Could it be hurtful to send for some one— some minister of any denomination, it does not matter which— to explain it, and show you how very far you have erred from its precepts; and how unfit you will be for its heaven, unless a change takes place before you die?’

‘I’m rather obliged than angry, Nelly,’ he said, ‘for you remind me of the manner in which I desire to be buried.   It is to be carried to the churchyard in the evening.   You and Hareton may, if you please, accompany me: and mind, particularly, to notice that the sexton obeys my directions concerning the two coffins!   No minister need come; nor need anything be said over me.— I tell you I have nearly attained my heaven; and that of others is altogether unvalued and uncoveted by me.’

In the same exchange, he refuses to accept that he has treated anyone unjustly, even seemingly, the younger Catherine: ‘As to repenting of my injustices, I’ve done no injustice, and I repent of nothing.’

This annoying refusal to accept responsibility for his wrongdoing is of course, very human. Nevertheless, the author takes care to sprinkle the book with many references to his seemingly demonically inspired behaviour.

As Thormähelen notes, he spits out the words that summarise Christian virtues with contempt: ‘duty’, ‘humanity’ ‘charity’ an d ‘pity’. Although he worships the first Catherine, he does not feel this sort of tenderness towards her, and his savage treatment of her when she is dying in fact hastens her death. This parting, of course, he appreciates will leave him in a sort of hell on earth, as he regards her as his ‘soul’.

The more metaphysically inclined reader wonders at the fate of these two barbaric lovers in the next world. Are they joined in death, perhaps in a form of purgatorial existence, or separated until they can love in a slightly more spiritual way, or condemned to walk the earth together until they can abandon their unholy alliance?

Joseph, that caricature of a Calvinist, has no doubt as to the final destination of Heathcliff or Catherine:

‘‘Th’ divil’s harried off his soul,’ he cried, ‘and he may hev’ his carcass into t’ bargin, for aught I care!   Ech! what a wicked ’un he looks, girning at death!’ and the old sinner grinned in mockery.   I thought he intended to cut a caper round the bed; but suddenly composing himself, he fell on his knees, and raised his hands, and returned thanks that the lawful master and the ancient stock were restored to their rights.’

The country folk would certainly talk about ghosts anyway; but the hint that the two godless lovers do indeed walk, is shown by the famous encounter between the down to earth Nelly and a little shepherd boy on the moor one twilght:

 ‘I encountered a little boy with a sheep and two lambs before him; he was crying terribly; and I supposed the lambs were skittish, and would not be guided. ‘What is the matter, my little man?’ I asked.

 ‘There’s Heathcliff and a woman yonder, under t’ nab,’ he blubbered, ‘un’ I darnut pass ’em.’

 I saw nothing; but neither the sheep nor he would go on so I bid him take the road lower down.’

As Charlotte Brontë has observed, if it wasn’t for his very occasional flashes of humanity in his mild affection for Nelly Dean and Hareton, it would be difficult to think of Heathcliff as having any human emotions at all, for as she says, the attachment he shares  with Cathy is a terrible and relentless (though intriguingly asexual) obsession, not any form of true love.

Hareton, in fact, is an interesting pointer about the author’s attitude towards the problem of dealing with evil.

This is not done by conscious design on the far from cerebral Hareton’s part. But he is naturally fearless, and not only does he not only feel none of that dread and fear that most people feel for Heathcliff, but he is even fond of the man who led his real father to his ruin and usurped Hareton’s own rights, regarding him as a sort of stepfather.

Therefore, as Thormähelen astutely observes, Hareton is not corrupted. He is, in fact, able to remain essentially untouched by Heathcliff’s scheme to degrade him as Hindley’s heir. He may be able to make him illiterate and seemingly brutish, but he cannot make him mean spirited. Heathcliff himself sees Hareton’s intrinsic worth, particularly compared to his own son, Linton, who was almost certainly conceived in hatred, and very probably through rape. Catherine, of course, comes at last comes to see how she has misjudged him and they fall in love and history comes full circle. This time, however, there is a happy outcome, for Hareton and the young Cathy have all the capacity for human affection lacking in original lovers.

The author also notes, about Heathcliff and his life devoted to revenge, a thing that I have noticed myself. Adopted and spoilt by the ailing Mr Earnshaw, his degradation to the place of a servant by Hindley after the older Earnshaw’s death, leading to his rejection by Cathy, is:

‘The basis for Heathcliff’s revenge,and compared to the crimes and sufferings that prompted his Elizabethan and Jacobean predecessors to take up arms against an assortment of evildoers, it is not a very impressive one. All the wrongs he sets out to avenge are wrongs directed against himself. Nobody has murdered a parent or child of his, and his loved one, as he recognises, in effect murders herself.’

In other words, there is something rather ridiculous and self-pitying about Heathcliff’s refusal to get over his childhood wrongs at the hands of Hindley for twenty years. By the standards of a rough age, they were not excessive when compared to many. Still, Heathcliff dedicates his life to hatred.

Even his speech towards the end, when he sees in Hareton as he sits with the younger Catherine ‘The ghost of my immortal love; of my wild endeavours to hold my right; my degradation, my pride, my happiness, and my anguish’ cannot in all its dramatic effect make this decidedly ignoble basis for his grand scheme of vengeance anything but mean spirited.

Hareton, as the author points out, escapes largely undamaged from his upbringing in the terrible atmosphere of Wuthering Heights precisely because he does not hate his enemy. Presumably sensing Heathcliff’s grudging admiration and affection, he cannot really accept that he is an enemy.

And as Emily Brontë  was, for all her apparent heterodoxy, a parson’s daughter, and as the Christian response to a sinner is to hate the sin but love the sinner, this is highly appropriate.

Partly because he cannot properly degrade Hareton, Heathcliff’s elaborate plans for revenge fail. For now, haunted by his vision of Cathy, he has lost interest in that vengeance, as reflected in his famous speech to Nelly.

‘‘It is a poor conclusion, is it not?’ he observed, having brooded awhile on the scene he had just witnessed: ‘an absurd termination to my violent exertions?   I get levers and mattocks to demolish the two houses, and train myself to be capable of working like Hercules, and when everything is ready and in my power, I find the will to lift a slate off either roof has vanished!   My old enemies have not beaten me; now would be the precise time to revenge myself on their representatives: I could do it; and none could hinder me.   But where is the use?   I don’t care for striking: I can’t take the trouble to raise my hand!   That sounds as if I had been labouring the whole time only to exhibit a fine trait of magnanimity.   It is far from being the case: I have lost the faculty of enjoying their destruction, and I am too idle to destroy for nothing.’

Heathcliff’s going unrepentant to his death may strike some readers as romantic, but his end, completely lacking in insight as it is, strikes me as bleak.  It is, of course, impossible for a healthy man in his prime to starve to death in a few days, and his death, whatever it is caused by, is certainly not caused  by his refusing to eat for that length of time.

He is mourned by nobody save Hareton, and all the evil he has devoted two decades towards accomplishing is undone by the coming together of the two young lovers.  Yet, though love triumphs over hate at the end of the story, it is, as Marianne Thormähelen observes,  about as unsentimental a depiction of the power of good over evil as can be imagined.

Thormähelen considers that neither vengeance nor forgiveness is allowed a decisive victory in the world of ‘Wuthering Heights’. Here, I would disagree: I think that after all the horror of inhumanity, forgiveness does triumph in the world of the novel: but only just.

Review of Fanny Burney’s ‘Evelina’

I’m re-posting this old review. My goodness, I can’t believe it’s been eight years since I wrote it. This was around the time I published ‘Ravensdale’. I’ve been writing this blog forever…

I’ve finally finished this three volume marathon and I wish I could write a more positive review.

I am particularly sorry to write a negative one about a woman who wrote one of the first novels which highlight women’s issues, in however limited a fashion, and who so bravely underwent an amputation of the breast in the days before anaesthetics.

However, I do think that these points I make, which I haven’t found elsewhere, need saying.

I started off with high hopes, and if at first the heroine seemed priggish and smug and the characterization generally seemed flat, then after all, eighteenth century novels often take a long time to get going.

I could see that the author was making a genuine attempt to depict the treatment of women in a society where they had no vote and were openly regarded as second class citizens ( as distinct from  having the vote and being seen by many covertly as second class citizens).

Yes, well. I seem to be in a sour mood today, but I’ve been reading this book for the last few weeks, and whatever my mood, I had strong criticisms of it that unfortunately outweighed my appreciation of the author’s attempt to address problems previously ignored by largely male writers. Probably they shouldn’t have; but they did.

Interestingly, although I’ve only taken a cursory look through the literary criticism of this on the web, I haven’t found the points I thought  particularly weak or objectionable mentioned.

I was surprised at the sheer dullness and flat characterization in  this classic, which supposedly is written with such brilliant psychological insight, and I had heard, has a likable, human heroine. I found the characters one dimensional and often their actions were frankly unbelievable.

It is certainly true that it does attempt to tackle the problems faced by a sheltered, aristocratic young woman when exposed to the false values and male dominance in wider society, but because Evelina and her mentor and guardian Mr Villars also endorse those same patriarchal values which the rakes and fops hold in debased form, this criticism is toothless and ineffectual.

I have often wondered from where Mary Bennet in ‘Pride and Prejudice’ got her sententious quote about women’s so-called honour being ‘as brittle as it is beautiful’; now I know: it’s straight from the pen of goody-goody Mr Villars.

This is meant to be largely a comic novel with serious purpose and I’m all for that. Yet somehow, I didn’t find it worked for me (it obviously did for Johnson, and may well for many others), because the characters are all like caricatures, which removes any possibility of drawing any serious lesson from them.  Again, I usually love knock about humour, but as all this (save the monkey incident) is directed at aging women (in the case of the race, between two women of over eighty)  it is painful rather than funny.

I don’t see how Captain Mirvan’s pretending to be a highway robber, dragging Madame Duval from her carriage, shaking her, tearing off her wig, dumping her in a muddy ditch and leaving her tied up is anything but purely ugly. For sure, the heroine protests that it is very bad, but it is clearly intended by the author to be an amusing episode too. Later, Evelina greets the man she knows did this to her grandmother with smiles.

A problem often cited with another epistolary novel, ‘Pamela’ is that because she has to repeat scenes highly flattering to her, she comes across as vain, reveling in Mr B’s obsessive pursuit of her.  I often wondered just how I could feel so unsympathetic towards a young girl at the mercy of her immoral rape-contemplating master. I found the same problem arose here.

It’s made worse,because unlike in real life, the other women who are rivals for male attention don’t even deny Evelina’s vaunted attractions and appeal for men. They just sulk soundlessly while Evelina solemnly reports every compliment she receives from the immoral rakes to her guardian. We never hear of any spiteful, jealous put downs from her rivals. If women are going to be shown as sexually competitive, the writer should at least be realistic about it, and show the levels of spite to which low minded women can unfortunately descend in such situations.

In recounting scenes meant to show wearisome sexual harassment and even a semi abduction, Evelina comes across as smug and obsessed with her physical assets.  Presumably, besides the ‘red and white’ complexion so admired then,  which is much commented on in the novel, these would include the long nose and double chin also fashionable.

I know modern writers like myself go in dread of being accused of creating a Mary Sue, and this is a term often used unthinkingly by reviewers over a character they resent, but I think one has to read this to realize just what a real Mary Sue is (or a Marty Stu, in the case of the faultless, handsome and brave Lord Orville).

Everyone either desires, admires, envies or frankly worships Evelina. The qualities of her mind are constantly stressed, though they seemed very unremarkable to my twenty-first century understanding, except in her ability to repress anger against the father who for so long rejects her. Everyone thinks Lord Orville is wonderful, too, except himself and possibly, the villain of the piece Sir Clement Willoughby.

Though supposedly a good Christian, Evelina sits in harsh judgement on all the morally faulty characters – eagerly repeating their misbehaviour in tones of outrage –  save for her father Sir John Belmont. This self- satisfied priggishness doesn’t seem to be seen by the author as one of the difficulties in coping with society which Evelina must overcome if she is to be wise and prudent.

As for the hero, he never comes to life at all; the heroine might as well fall in love with a handsome talking statue which utters highly appropriate phrases at times; the villain of the piece, Sir Clement Willoughby, is far more lively and interesting.

There are also a series of highly improbable, even ludicrous, co-incidences in this involving Evelina’s unknown half brother, Mr Macartney (as, incredibly, she never gets round to referring to him by his first name, I don’t know what it is).

On going to Paris, he just happens to meet and fall in love with the woman whom he later finds out is believed to be his half sister, and then on going to London, he just happens to stay in the house belonging to his true half sister Evelina’s relatives. For goodness sake! If this was written as grotesque comedy, it might work, but this part is written as pure tragedy.

I ploughed through it. Of course, one has to take into account that the psychology of the times was rudimentary, and Evelina subjected to modern scrutiny comes across as very different to how she appeared to her creator and the readers of the time. Still, I certainly can’t recommend it except as a way of gathering background information on society life and the highly repressed sexual nature of respectable women in the second part of the late eighteenth century. Johnson, who so loved Evelina, obviously only approved of females totally cut off from their sexuality. If they weren’t, well: ‘The woman’s a whore and there’s an end of the matter.’

Review of ‘Conflicted Magic’ by Christina Herlyn: A Tantalising Taster for a Gripping Series

In the dystopian world which develops on the coming of the asteroid Atlas, there are certain grades of people.

There are the Normals, who must be protected from the dreadful monsters who emerged from the volcanoes that erupted on the arrival of Atlas. There are also the Evolutionaries, born with a mutated gene – and nobody wants to be one of them. Evolutionaries are fated to become warriors, used to defend the Normals against the monsters.

There is another category, but it’s secret: these are the Magics , whose but power was revitalised by the arrival of Atlas.

Josiah Hightower is a Magic, being a thunderbird. Fired by curiosity about the nature of Evolutionaries and their unenviable role, he has moved to Kansas City to become:  ‘Warden Josiah Hightower, superior to over twenty Eliminators for the Mythical Creatures Elimination Squad, M-kes for short. He’d left a better paying position, pissed off his parents, and moved to a city where he had zero contacts.’

Here, Josiah discovers that there are more secretive goings on than he had ever supposed. These are dark, and M-kes has a general attitude towards it’s Elminators, which goes beyond indifference into outright exploitation.  He is aware of a power struggle taking place within M-kes, and wants to find out what’s at stake.

Another mystery is Josiah’s instant fascination with M-kes star Eliminator, Andromeda Bochs. Andee, whose skin and eyes have been turned purple by the ingot implants that Evolutionaries are argued to need to shield them from the radiation of Atlas, is almost the archetype warrior woman – save for the fangs given her by that ‘E gene’. Nearly six foot tall, she has legs to match and a liking for leather, a mane of chestnut hair, and sports a katana – which she inherited from a dead fellow warrior.

And after all, Josiah is built so that he can view even such a woman  as this as almost kittenish.

She makes an impression on him that he can’t deny, but this is not what Josiah planned: he doesn’t want his ambiguous relationship towards M-kes further complicated by his having strong feelings for any of their employees.

Still, he has other concerns: for instance, he is being shadowed by a giant, super intelligent feline.

Then, he is also being pursued by the siren-like Sophia. Is her attraction magical?  It is very possible that she is another secret Magic, for with her striking brunette colouring and curves, she is like a Sexy Scientist taken to extremes.

Then there is what to make of muscular, enigmatic Thomas Waya, whom no women in the organisation seems to be able to resist. And Josiah definitely wants Andee to resist Waya….

Josiah Hightower and Andromeda Bochs are two of my favourite characters in modern fantasy, so I am always happy to read about them.  

This short novella makes an intriguing addition to the series. As ever the writing is vivid, the story fast moving,  the characters engaging, and an enjoyable vein of humour sparkles through it:.’Not only was the lion involved with the blue goo, but it had spied on him—no insulted him with its territory marking at his house. He needed to return the favor. The spying part. He avoided spreading his bodily fluids around..’

Review of ‘When the Moon Whispers’ by Rebecca Lochlann: Brilliant and Dramatic

I was immediately drawn into this epic series, by the first book, which takes place in Bronze Age Greece. I was entranced by the unusual combination of outstanding historical research, excellent writing style, intriguing characters and exciting theme. Since then, and I have been eagerly following the progress of this saga of a battle between the forces of matriarchy and patriarchy.
I was looking forward to this latest, which clearly was going to have the definitiveclash between the protagonists. I am happy to say that it brings the underlying conflict of the earlier books to an explosive, harrowing, cathartic and satisfying conclusion.
I wrote of the ending of the third book in the Greek part of the series, ‘In the Moon of Asterion’ that the climatic ending there was ‘like a series of fireworks set off’. That if even more true in this one. I anticipate, but want to assure the reader that she or he won’t be disappointed.
Back in Bronze Age Crete, the patriarchal invader, the hubristic and swaggeringly macho Prince of Mycenae Chrysaleon, was given the choice between joining the matriarchal Queen Aridela in progressing humanity’s future towards peace and co-operation between male and female, or defying the will of the Goddess Athene and playing a key part in plunging it into suffering, conflict and the oppression of woman.
He was too obsessed with power to be able to resist the latter course. Aided by his determined toady, the magically skilled Alixaire,he schemed to overthrow female rule in Crete. The youthful and gullible Aridela allowed herself to be blinded by her infatuation with him into falling for his schemes. Though drawn by her equally strong feelings for his illegitimate half-brother Menoetius – who inherited faith in the Goddess religion from his sorceress mother – Aridela allows herself to stay oblivious to Chrysaleon’s devious schemes, fired by his underlying contempt for all women but herself. She choses him above Menoetius, as the austure warrior, terribly scarred from a savaging by a lion, could not rival Chrysaleon’s appeal for a young girl.
Certainly, the two half-brothers were strangely linked even before birth, seemingly conceived in tandem on the same night, with hints of some form of sorcery by Menoetius’ s mother, and born during a terrible thunder storm. Sometimes they seem like two falsely opposing halves of one coin:
“She used the holy mushroom, that which priestesses call cara. She dried it, ground it up, and mixed it into the barley cake Idómeneus shared with his queen every evening. Deep in the night, she slipped into their bed and woke them with kisses. Idómeneus bragged about it.He said his queen awakened him desiring love, and that Sorcha joined them; though the queen hated her and wanted her dead, that night she kissed Sorcha, and both women together pleasured him. He laughed about it, and said he wasn’t sure if it was real…’
This linked fate is a theme that will repeat itself constantly through the incarnations through which these three must pass as reincarnations of these three original personalities.Athene has willed that history, propelled on its way by the mistaken decisions of these three initiators, must now follow its course until they all embrace their true destiny.
Chrysaleon and Alistaire, who in ancient Crete killed Aridela, Menoetius and Selene, Aridela’s Amazonian warrior protector, were cursed by Athene through Selene and Aridela’s late father, Damesen: ‘Betrayal cannot come from nothing…It weaves backward and forward, in and out of the thread of life and death, of faith and love, envy and desire. This future will only come to pass if the child is first deceived by those to whom she gives her trust.’
‘You and your master shall wander. Glimpses of joy shall be ripped from you. You will beg for death, but death will refuse you. You will follow…and follow without end.’
‘You have set this world upon its path, and so you will live it. You will watch it unfold, and you alone will remember everything that you have done. Until you honour your vow, you will carry the burden of your deceptions, and they will grow heavy.’
Through seven lives, the reincarnated Chrysaleon sets himself against Athene and female power. Through many lifetimes he furthers the repression against it and schemes, always opposed by the former Menoetius. Always, he is drawn to the former Aridela. She always remains, as the goddess decrees, unable to see his basic contempt for women. Neither she, nor Menoetius, are granted memories of their previous lives. While memories of their previous existence and the role of Athene in their fate seems to give Chrysaleon and Alixaire, besides mental torture and advantage, he has never, as predicted, succeeded in finding happiness, while the servile Alixaire has always followed Chrystaleon ‘like a wrinkled gnome’, furthering his aims to the point of murder.
Others join in this epic struggle. Themiste, the once oracle of Crete, must make up for her former cowardice in not admitting her own part in Chrysaleon’s betrayal. The reincarnated bodyguard Selene has never wavered in her courage and dedication to Athene.
Another individual joins them in every life. The sadistic once Prince of Tyre, Harpalycus, uses black magic to shift from body to body and to add misery and suffering to the world in general, and Athene’s three chosen instruments in particular.
This latest – penultimate, but largely climatic – episode of the saga takes place in a dystopian society fifty years in the future. The former Chrysaleon is now Raphael Konstantinou, a close advisor of the US president. Though he only regains his memory belatedly in this lifetime, he is has obviously been driven by unconscious memories to further his goal of destroying female power. Now, heis near to succeeding.
This is not all his own doing; he has been aided in this by the now President Novikov of the all powerful coalition of Ukrus, who through the use of secret weapons, has intimidated the former western world – save for a few ‘independent territories’ into falling in with his plans for world domination, and the total subjugation of women. In fact, Novikov takes his plans for the destruction of female independence further than Raphael Konstantinou ever intended, and such is his power that he cannot be opposed.
The once Queen in her own right, Aridela is in this lifetime Rafe’s compliant wife Erin– with the help of a little mood calming from pills. Even with those, Erin finds it hard to accept the controlling ways of her mother-in-law from Hades –Cordelia (who unlike the Cordelia in ‘King Lear’ does not stand up to an overbearing patriarch). They have a daughter. A terrible form of lunacy has unaccountably started attacking all women. Erin, as Rafe’s wife, is involved in the campaign to persuade them to surrender themselves to quarantine.
But then, something happens which causes her to flee her palatial home. Wandering dazed after a car crash, she runs into Rafe’s detested younger brother, Will, now living an almost hermit like existence in a cabin in the woods about Mount Sneffles. Erin finds herself unable to go back, for all that she desperately misses her daughter, and stays away for over twenty years.
When circumstances beyond her control force her to return – by means of some hideous experiences – it is to a terrible USA ruled by a grotesquely distorted form of evangelical Christianity. Erin is staggered. Somehow, she must fight this. But how, as one woman against the world? Aided by visits to the artefacts from Ancient Greece which Rafe seems almost compelled to collect, Erin’s memories begin to return, and even as she begins to realise the extent of Rafe/Chrysaleon’s treachery through the ages, she also understands that she is not alone.
But the path ahead is hard, ‘harder than you can imagine.’ Before Erin the ‘housefrau’ can become Erin the Erinyes, she must suffer abuse of every sort, and terrible bereavement: only then caqn she attempt to fulfil the role given to her by the Goddess Athene. Through the enslaved US of a dystopian future, through Crete, through Scotland, through struggles on the astral plane, ErinThe Erinyes, and other champions of Athene – fight against this new, dystopic world order. They fight apathy and hostility from women, assassins, killings, grief and brainwashing attempts. Just as in their former lives there were many betrayals, echoes of those of the Bronze Age, so there are in this one. Even the truth of Chrysaleon’s repeated oath, that he would love Aridela, ‘For as long as the pyramids stand in Egypt’ acquires ironic emphasis in this battle.
This epic struggle and transformative process will finally take Erin to the strangest of worlds: ‘The air moved through my hair like a sigh. The heavens above us resembled a wet watercolour. The sand was silky and lustrous, like lights were shining underneath.’
I regard ‘The Child of the Erinyes’ as a unique achievement. This book, which resolves many of the issues created by the original series of faulty decisions on the part of the protagonists and other characters, fulfils the promise of the escalating tension inthe other novels.
In this lifetime, too, the once Aridela, Chrysaleon and Menoetius most resemble their old selves physically – which emphasizes the huge chasm between what they once were, and what they have become.
Followers of the series will have noted the enjoyable humorous touches the author inserts. One of these is that in his return in this life, the wrinkled old slave Alexaire is now a woman, who desires the former Chrysaleon as much as ever…
Finally, I’d like to say that I feel smug about foreseeing the outcome of one of these age-old conflict of loyalties, but I won’t put any more, as I don’t want to write a spoiler.

Brilliant and Dramatic

I was immediately drawn into this epic series, by the first book, which takes place in Bronze Age Greece. I was entranced by the unusual combination of outstanding historical research, excellent writing style, intriguing characters and exciting theme. Since then, and I have been eagerly following the progress of this saga of a battle between the forces of matriarchy and patriarchy.
I was looking forward to this latest, which clearly was going to have the definitiveclash between the protagonists. I am happy to say that it brings the underlying conflict of the earlier books to an explosive, harrowing, cathartic and satisfying conclusion.
I wrote of the ending of the third book in the Greek part of the series, ‘In the Moon of Asterion’ that the climatic ending there was ‘like a series of fireworks set off’. That if even more true in this one. I anticipate, but want to assure the reader that she or he won’t be disappointed.
Back in Bronze Age Crete, the patriarchal invader, the hubristic and swaggeringly macho Prince of Mycenae Chrysaleon, was given the choice between joining the matriarchal Queen Aridela in progressing humanity’s future towards peace and co-operation between male and female, or defying the will of the Goddess Athene and playing a key part in plunging it into suffering, conflict and the oppression of woman.
He was too obsessed with power to be able to resist the latter course. Aided by his determined toady, the magically skilled Alixaire,he schemed to overthrow female rule in Crete. The youthful and gullible Aridela allowed herself to be blinded by her infatuation with him into falling for his schemes. Though drawn by her equally strong feelings for his illegitimate half-brother Menoetius – who inherited faith in the Goddess religion from his sorceress mother – Aridela allows herself to stay oblivious to Chrysaleon’s devious schemes, fired by his underlying contempt for all women but herself. She choses him above Menoetius, as the austure warrior, terribly scarred from a savaging by a lion, could not rival Chrysaleon’s appeal for a young girl.
Certainly, the two half-brothers were strangely linked even before birth, seemingly conceived in tandem on the same night, with hints of some form of sorcery by Menoetius’ s mother, and born during a terrible thunder storm. Sometimes they seem like two falsely opposing halves of one coin:
“She used the holy mushroom, that which priestesses call cara. She dried it, ground it up, and mixed it into the barley cake Idómeneus shared with his queen every evening. Deep in the night, she slipped into their bed and woke them with kisses. Idómeneus bragged about it.He said his queen awakened him desiring love, and that Sorcha joined them; though the queen hated her and wanted her dead, that night she kissed Sorcha, and both women together pleasured him. He laughed about it, and said he wasn’t sure if it was real…’
This linked fate is a theme that will repeat itself constantly through the incarnations through which these three must pass as reincarnations of these three original personalities.Athene has willed that history, propelled on its way by the mistaken decisions of these three initiators, must now follow its course until they all embrace their true destiny.
Chrysaleon and Alistaire, who in ancient Crete killed Aridela, Menoetius and Selene, Aridela’s Amazonian warrior protector, were cursed by Athene through Selene and Aridela’s late father, Damesen: ‘Betrayal cannot come from nothing…It weaves backward and forward, in and out of the thread of life and death, of faith and love, envy and desire. This future will only come to pass if the child is first deceived by those to whom she gives her trust.’
‘You and your master shall wander. Glimpses of joy shall be ripped from you. You will beg for death, but death will refuse you. You will follow…and follow without end.’
‘You have set this world upon its path, and so you will live it. You will watch it unfold, and you alone will remember everything that you have done. Until you honour your vow, you will carry the burden of your deceptions, and they will grow heavy.’
Through seven lives, the reincarnated Chrysaleon sets himself against Athene and female power. Through many lifetimes he furthers the repression against it and schemes, always opposed by the former Menoetius. Always, he is drawn to the former Aridela. She always remains, as the goddess decrees, unable to see his basic contempt for women. Neither she, nor Menoetius, are granted memories of their previous lives. While memories of their previous existence and the role of Athene in their fate seems to give Chrysaleon and Alixaire, besides mental torture and advantage, he has never, as predicted, succeeded in finding happiness, while the servile Alixaire has always followed Chrystaleon ‘like a wrinkled gnome’, furthering his aims to the point of murder.
Others join in this epic struggle. Themiste, the once oracle of Crete, must make up for her former cowardice in not admitting her own part in Chrysaleon’s betrayal. The reincarnated bodyguard Selene has never wavered in her courage and dedication to Athene.
Another individual joins them in every life. The sadistic once Prince of Tyre, Harpalycus, uses black magic to shift from body to body and to add misery and suffering to the world in general, and Athene’s three chosen instruments in particular.
This latest – penultimate, but largely climatic – episode of the saga takes place in a dystopian society fifty years in the future. The former Chrysaleon is now Raphael Konstantinou, a close advisor of the US president. Though he only regains his memory belatedly in this lifetime, he is has obviously been driven by unconscious memories to further his goal of destroying female power. Now, heis near to succeeding.
This is not all his own doing; he has been aided in this by the now President Novikov of the all powerful coalition of Ukrus, who through the use of secret weapons, has intimidated the former western world – save for a few ‘independent territories’ into falling in with his plans for world domination, and the total subjugation of women. In fact, Novikov takes his plans for the destruction of female independence further than Raphael Konstantinou ever intended, and such is his power that he cannot be opposed.
The once Queen in her own right, Aridela is in this lifetime Rafe’s compliant wife Erin– with the help of a little mood calming from pills. Even with those, Erin finds it hard to accept the controlling ways of her mother-in-law from Hades –Cordelia (who unlike the Cordelia in ‘King Lear’ does not stand up to an overbearing patriarch). They have a daughter. A terrible form of lunacy has unaccountably started attacking all women. Erin, as Rafe’s wife, is involved in the campaign to persuade them to surrender themselves to quarantine.
But then, something happens which causes her to flee her palatial home. Wandering dazed after a car crash, she runs into Rafe’s detested younger brother, Will, now living an almost hermit like existence in a cabin in the woods about Mount Sneffles. Erin finds herself unable to go back, for all that she desperately misses her daughter, and stays away for over twenty years.
When circumstances beyond her control force her to return – by means of some hideous experiences – it is to a terrible USA ruled by a grotesquely distorted form of evangelical Christianity. Erin is staggered. Somehow, she must fight this. But how, as one woman against the world? Aided by visits to the artefacts from Ancient Greece which Rafe seems almost compelled to collect, Erin’s memories begin to return, and even as she begins to realise the extent of Rafe/Chrysaleon’s treachery through the ages, she also understands that she is not alone.
But the path ahead is hard, ‘harder than you can imagine.’ Before Erin the ‘housefrau’ can become Erin the Erinyes, she must suffer abuse of every sort, and terrible bereavement: only then caqn she attempt to fulfil the role given to her by the Goddess Athene. Through the enslaved US of a dystopian future, through Crete, through Scotland, through struggles on the astral plane, ErinThe Erinyes, and other champions of Athene – fight against this new, dystopic world order. They fight apathy and hostility from women, assassins, killings, grief and brainwashing attempts. Just as in their former lives there were many betrayals, echoes of those of the Bronze Age, so there are in this one. Even the truth of Chrysaleon’s repeated oath, that he would love Aridela, ‘For as long as the pyramids stand in Egypt’ acquires ironic emphasis in this battle.
This epic struggle and transformative process will finally take Erin to the strangest of worlds: ‘The air moved through my hair like a sigh. The heavens above us resembled a wet watercolour. The sand was silky and lustrous, like lights were shining underneath.’
I regard ‘The Child of the Erinyes’ as a unique achievement. This book, which resolves many of the issues created by the original series of faulty decisions on the part of the protagonists and other characters, fulfils the promise of the escalating tension inthe other novels.
In this lifetime, too, the once Aridela, Chrysaleon and Menoetius most resemble their old selves physically – which emphasizes the huge chasm between what they once were, and what they have become.
Followers of the series will have noted the enjoyable humorous touches the author inserts. One of these is that in his return in this life, the wrinkled old slave Alexaire is now a woman, who desires the former Chrysaleon as much as ever…
Finally, I’d like to say that I feel smug about foreseeing the outcome of one of these age-old conflict of loyalties, but I won’t put any more, as I don’t want to write a spoiler.