The Ruin of a Rake, by Cat Sebastian

[Ulysses]

The Ruin of a Rake
By Cat Sebastian
Avon Impulse, 2017
Five stars

I find all contemporary regency novels suspect. As a teenager I read a lot of Georgette Heyer, so I know what a good historical regency romance should be. But I’ve also read all of Jane Austen, and I read Thackeray’s “Vanity Fair” twice, so I know what a period novel about regency England should be like. The very genre is so fraught with pitfalls. Add a gay love story into that, and it just seems to be a disaster waiting to happen.

But no. I’ll be damned if Cat Sebastian doesn’t pull it off with startling elegance and grace. I’ve loved the other books in this loosely interconnected series, “The Soldier’s Scoundrel” and “The Lawrence Browne Affair,” and this, against all odds, was my favorite of the three.

Lord Courtenay has flickered through the other two books—the ne’er-do-well hedonist who scandalizes all good society. We think we know him a bit (but we don’t). And for this volume Cat Sebastian gives us Julian Medlock, who appeared in London from India six years earlier as hardly more than a teenager, vastly rich and without parents. Julian was accompanied by his sister Eleanor, herself married to a baronet, who has remained mysteriously absent since their arrival in London.

What, on the surface, is a clever, droll comedy of mores as well as a romance, is in fact much more modern that it seems. Beyond the whole issue of same-sex love, there’s a dark thread of race, class, and social hypocrisy that reminds us of the ugly truths that often lay beneath the exquisitely polished veneer of regency manners. Medlock and Courtenay are cast as polar opposites, until both they and the reader discover this to be untrue. It is a delicious slow burn as the fussy, calculating Medlock begins to maneuver the indolent and supposedly selfish Courtenay, revealing secrets on both sides as the men gradually come to understand themselves and each other.

While not slavish to period English, Sebastian manages to make her prose and her dialogue believable and readable. Some of it is brilliant. A favorite line:

“Courtenay watched as his mother’s green eyes narrowed ever so slightly. He knew that look. It was like watching a man reload a pistol.”

Because all romances are somewhat predictable, I found myself anticipating the plot as it unrolled, only to find myself surprised several times by twists and turns that never veered from the truth of the characters. The romance is intense and well crafted, but the emotional simmer is wonderful and satisfying. Both Julian and Courtenay are men about whom we feel little at first, but who become very dear to us by the end. This is the job of any romance novelist, but to do so with a smart plot and convincing period language and detail takes a special skill.