Ferreting it Away Before it Dies

So the big news in Science at the moment is that Scientists have created artificial life!.

First of all. Dear newspapers, news websites, news programs and other news media. Please for the love of all that is holy stop attributing things to “scientists”. “Scientist” isn’t a job description, it is at best a way of describing a broad category of people with vaguely similar qualifications. Opening a story about the recent implantation of synthetic DNA into a bacterium with the headline “Scientists Create Artificial Life” is about as helpful as me opening this article with the headline “Arts Graduates Talk Shit About Microbiology”.

So anyway, it appears that a geneticist by the name of Craig Venter (who was one of the big names behind the human genome project, although I confess that I’d never heard of the guy before) along with the rest of his team (a team which, digging a bit deeper, he may not actually have been the head of – some sources seem to credit the initial announcement to one Daniel Gibson, although that may just be because Gibson’s name is alphabetically first) have successfully implanted a synthetic genome into a bacterium, causing it to behave like a different bacterium.

Now to give the press their due here, part of the reason that so many newspapers are running with the “artificial life” byline is that Venter (who is, by all accounts, a bit of a showman) is keen to claim that this is exactly what they’ve created. Venter and his team make a wide variety of incredible claims for this technology – that it will allow us to reverse climate change, produce limitless cheap fuel, and cure whatever diseases are big at the moment. And of course on the other side of the fence there are folks saying that this will lead to the end of the world and genetically engineered super-bacteria invading Kensington. And if I had a penny for every time I’d seen the words “playing God” I’d be able to get an extra cup of coffee out the vending machine.

What’s staggering about this story, from my point of view at least, is how utterly ignorant most people seem to be about how all of this stuff actually works.

Here are some choice quotes from the BBC “have your say” section:

You can't control evolution. It only takes one of these bacteria to mate with another and you have serious and posibly extinction problems. Not a good idea.

Ah yes. Bacteria. Well known for mating with each other.

For those who have an imaginary friend and think we are playing god, yes we probably are, and we are getting very good at it. It's no longer just nature that can create new life. People can do it too, although we are just part of nature ourselves really, aren't we!

Ka-ching! That’ll be a penny, thanks. So… do you actually have anything to say other than “this sounds awesome but I have no idea what any of it actually means”?

Also. The “god = imaginary friend” line? Are you fucking twelve?

Before this study continues we need to be sure that the "bacteria" doesn't mutate like all other organisms in this world do. We all know computers have flaws. This scientist is just in way over his head and he needs to slow down. This could do more harm than good. This could be a step toward ending global warming or it could be a step towards mind control. Watch out it is 1984 all over again.

Umm … okay. So you know that all organisms in the world mutate. But you seem to think that if this organism was to mutate, for some reason that would be unconscionably terrible? And where exactly is the mind control thing coming from.

Of course it’s not just the ignorant plebs that post to the BBC main page that spout this mindless dogshit. Michael Hanlon, Science Editor for the Daily Mail writes:

It is possible to imagine a synthetic microbe going on the rampage, perhaps wiping out all the world’s crop plants or even humanity itself.

Well yes. It is indeed possible to imagine that. It is possible to imagine anything you damned well want. I could imagine an army of killer penguins going on the rampage and wiping out all the world’s crop plants or perhaps even humanity itself. It doesn’t mean it’s remotely plausible.

Aside from a few echoing voices of sanity, the discussion of this story is just a desperate, mortifying condemnation of how little basic understanding of biology people have.

DNA For Dummies

DNA or “deoxyribose nucleic acid” as it is known to its friends and drinking buddies, is a sequence of “base pairs” which in layman's terms form a set of instructions which tell our cells how to develop and how to behave.

Just as Venter observes, DNA “code” is effectively made from four chemicals, Adenine, Cytosine, Guanine and Thymine. This is what he was talking about when he said that his “artificial life” had been made from “four bottles of chemicals”. Although DNA is extremely complex overall, the chemicals it is made from are very basic, and reasonably well understood. “Scientists” have, in fact, been producing artificial DNA for years, and have been swapping the DNA of bacteria around for so long that it's taught at A-Level.

Chris Ventner's analogy is that DNA is like the “software” to the cell's computer, and this analogy is more or less correct. But it's exactly this analogy that makes the whole “Artificial Life” thing sound so stupid. If you took a computer, scrubbed the hard drive, and then installed a new operating system which you had copied from another computer, you wouldn't claim to have created that computer yourself. You certainly wouldn't expect to get your face on the cover of Wired with headlines saying “SCIENTISTS CREATE ARTIFICIAL COMPUTER IN LABORATORY”.

As one of the (depressingly rare) sane commentators on the BBC article pointed out, it's not actually artificial DNA that's the challenge here, but artificial everything else. DNA is complex, but it's ultimately one chemical. Building a whole artificial cell would be vastly more difficult. Others pointed out that since the DNA implanted was effectively an artificial copy of the DNA of an existing bacterium, they didn't really “create” anything that didn't exist already, and again when it comes to DNA the hard part is working out what a particular bit of code actually does, not reproducing it.

Indeed it's all a bit Ship of Theseus. This “artificial life” consists of DNA copied from one living organism, implanted into the cells of another living organism, which carried on living. Were it not for the quasi-mystical significance which popular consciousness attaches to that strange stuff called “DNA” nobody would claim for a second that these guys had successfully “created life” any more than we say that people with pacemakers are cyborgs.

That's Life?

A big part of the problem with the “artificial life” claim is that when you get right down to it, “life” just isn't a well defined technical term. Yes there's the definition we all learn at GCSE (something is alive if it Moves, Respires, is Sensitive to its surroundings, Grows, Reproduces , Excretes and consumes Nutrition – the “Mrs Gren” definition) but that's a bad definition all around – if nothing else it applies to a great many things which you wouldn't describe as living, like fire.

Life, when you get right down to it, is a self-sustaining chemical reaction with an arbitrary level of complexity. You can say that a cow is alive and bag of nails isn't, but once you get into the freaky world of micro-organisms it gets far harder to draw the line (a lot of biologists draw it at viruses).

I said earlier that both sides of this whole stupid affair were as bad as each other. While the anti-science crowd are crying about “Playing God”, the pro-science crowd (who thanks to Dan Brown I will now forever think of as “Galileo's Illuminati”) are crowing about the fact that “Science” has created “life” and that this proves that religion is obsolete (seriously, a depressing number of people really do talk like they're in Angels and Demons).

The problem with the “Science Creates Life” soundbyte is that for it to have any meaning, you have to buy into the superstitious, quasi-mystical notion of “life-essence”. That there is somehow a tangible, observable, creatable force called “life” which has been hitherto beyond the reach of scientists.

“Life”, like “energy”, is lodged in the popular consciousness as being a kind of invisible liquid which flows to and from objects, rather like the Force. Heck, there's even a tendency to treat them as the same thing. Rather like the Force. In reality these sorts of ideas went out with the Victorians, but because they're easy to imagine, they've stuck around to this day. Anybody who hails this new “discovery” as a triumph of science over superstition has actually failed to understand what the scientific consensus on “life” has been for the past hundred years.

Nature and Artifice

The biggest source of stupidity in this whole non-story seems to be the persistent notion that it matters whether or not something is “natural”. This is pure superstition. It's like the old myths about microwaved water being bad for you because its “chemical structure” is somehow changed by the “radiation”.

The idea that “artificial” DNA can function just as well as “real” DNA should be utterly unsurprising to anybody with a basic understanding of the way science works. The fact that artificial DNA can be created is interesting, but only from an engineering perspective, it doesn't raise deep philosophical questions about the nature of life, because those questions have, in the mind of pretty much anybody who keeps up with the science, already been answered.

And in a sense, the same goes for the potential applications of this technology. There's been a whole lot of talk about how these “custom bacteria” will either save the world or destroy it (which, again, is exactly what Dan Brown says about antimatter at the start of Angels and Demons). This is nonsense.

We can already engineer “custom bacteria” using DNA from existing sources – as I learned during my sodding GCSEs, we already use it to produce insulin, and have been for over a decade. Whether the DNA we make these custom bacteria with is cut wholesale from other cells, or whether we make it ourselves from “bottles of chemicals” is irrelevant. We don't understand anywhere near enough about how DNA actually works to invent wholly new organisms, all we can do is copy bits and pieces of things that already exist and do more or less what we want. And we're not going to break any existing scientific laws. There's some talk of these bacteria being able to make fuel out of Carbon Dioxide, and to be fair they could (so can, y'know, plants) but they'd need an energy source to do it, so all it would really be is a complicated solar power plant.

Similarly, worrying about these “custom bacteria” mutating and destroying the world is rank idiocy. Bacteria exist. They mutate. There is no special quality in “natural” bacteria which prevents them from evolving into a world-destroying superplague. Michael Hanlon, in the Mail observes that there's “no guarantee” that these engineered bacteria will “follow the rules”. Where he thinks these “rules” come from, or why he thinks natural bacteria obey them, he does not explain. Perhaps he believes that there's some kind of long standing union agreement.

The same magical thinking arises time and again when a new technology allows us to do artificially something which has been happening naturally for centuries. Somehow we imagine that heating water with microwaves can turn it into a deadly poison, when heating it with infra red radiation doesn't, or that particle collisions in the LHC will create a black hole that destroys the solar system, when the billions of similar particle collisions that happen all the time all around us have no such effect.

“Scientists” have not “created life”. They've created some synthetic DNA, and implanted it into a bacterium, both of which are things we knew they could do already. It's technologically moderately interesting but it doesn't challenge our perception of what life is, it hasn't let the any genies out of any bottles, and it isn't going to make us all live forever.

None of those make good headlines though.

Arthur B

at 22:54 on 2010-05-22

Michael Hanlon, in the Mail observes that there's “no guarantee” that these engineered bacteria will “follow the rules”. Where he thinks these “rules” come from, or why he thinks natural bacteria obey them, he does not explain.

Yeah, at most you can say that all the natural bacteria and micro-organisms out there follow the "rules" of natural selection.

Which means that a synthetic bacterium brewed in a lab for some completely artificial purpose like producing human insulin is going to be far less likely to thrive in the wild than a "natural" bacterium which has been subject to all the dangers that threaten a wee microbe out in the big wide world. It's like expecting a family of chihuahuas to take down a wolf pack on the pack's home turf.

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Andy G

at 23:57 on 2010-05-22Interesting stuff!

“Life”, like “energy”, is lodged in the popular consciousness as being a kind of invisible liquid which flows to and from objects, rather like the Force. Heck, there's even a tendency to treat them as the same thing. Rather like the Force. In reality these sorts of ideas went out with the Victorians, but because they're easy to imagine, they've stuck around to this day.

Actually I have been writing an essay about a recent book that talks about life and energy in just those terms! But he is talking more about the way the world is experienced in consciousness (to try and describe the way in which the world appears "dead" to many people with schizophrenia). I think the problem with lots of Victorian thought was that it treated lots of concepts as if they were a matter of empirical reality (like the Creationists taking the Bible literally). And that's clearly lingered on Have Your Say.

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Rami

at 00:42 on 2010-05-23I'm probably wrong, but as I'd understood it, the more interesting work was in developing synthetic RNA to engineer already-understood bacteria into a wider range of useful applications?

Anyway, to regurgitate a tired old meme: I, for one, welcome our bacterial overlords...

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Viorica

at 02:05 on 2010-05-23. . . I'm sorry, you lost me at "DNA"

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Dan H

at 12:45 on 2010-05-23

I think the problem with lots of Victorian thought was that it treated lots of concepts as if they were a matter of empirical reality

To be fair, the "invisible fluid" models for things like life and energy were actually perfectly good physical theories for quite a long time, so for that matter was ether theory.

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Dan H

at 12:47 on 2010-05-23

I'm probably wrong, but as I'd understood it, the more interesting work was in developing synthetic RNA to engineer already-understood bacteria into a wider range of useful applications?

Yeah, something like that (although I believe that's far older technology). But funnily enough SCIENTISTS DEVELOP SYNTHETIC RNA is much less punchy than SCIENTISTS CREATE LIFE!

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Frank

at 15:46 on 2010-05-23

None of those make good headlines though.

Or excite investors.

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Jamie Johnston

at 16:17 on 2010-05-23I've got to the sub-heading 'DNA for dummies' and at this point I'm going to stop reading for a moment to summarize what I've understood of this story from my sole source of scientific news, namely BBC Radio 4. Then I'll read the rest of the article and see how accurately Radio 4 has informed me. It's like an experiment!

So my impression is that Venter's team (or whoever) has analyzed the DNA of some bacterium or other, put together molecules in the same combinations as that original DNA so as to make some new DNA that's functionally identical to the original DNA, and then put that DNA into a different 'empty' bacterium. The bacterium then happily wandered around being a bacterium, in every important way the same as if it had been 'born' naturally by, er, whatever the normal way for a bacterium to come into existence is (cell-division or something?). It also reproduced in the usual way (see earlier vagueness) to create new bacteria just as a 'natural' bacterium would do. In short, they've taken stuff that was previously not a living creature and made it into a living creature. It isn't a 'new organism' in the sense of being a new species. (Do bacteria have species? You know what I mean, though.) It's just a new individual. The whole business is exciting in as much as if you can make new DNA then you can (1) theoretically do cloning and stuff without having to take DNA from existing organisms, and (2) very very theoretically make DNA in new combinations and thus ultimately new types of organism.

Things I'm not clear about: I don't know on quite what level the new DNA was created, e.g., whether they took protein molecules they already had lying around and stuck them together, or whether they made the new molecules out of atoms and stuff, or what. I suspect it doesn't matter much. Also I have a mental image of the new DNA being somehow physically squirted into a microscopic empty cell-membrane bag, but I've no idea whether that's literally how it works. Nor do I know how they got the empty bacterium in the first place.

Now I'll read the rest of the article and see how wrong all that is.

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Dan H

at 16:27 on 2010-05-23I think the bit you're missing is that the "empty" bacterium was in fact a perfectly ordinary bacterium from which the DNA had been removed, so the other bacterium had, in fact, been "born" in the normal way, it's just that they had taken its DNA out and replaced it. So they took something that was actually totally a living creature, and made it into a slightly different living creature.

It's sort of like giving somebody a heart transplant and claiming that you'd created a living human on an operating table. It's technically true that neither the person receiving the transplant, nor the transplanted organ can survive independently of each other, but claiming that you have therefore "created" a whole new person would be farcical.

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Frank

at 16:32 on 2010-05-23re: 'Scientists'

On the latest edition of NPR's Science Friday, one of the segments discussed the origin of the word 'scientist'. The person who coined the word dismissed other possibilities to describe/define a 'cultivator of science'. The coiner (Well?) chose 'scientist' because it may remind readers/listeners of the word 'artist' who were apparently held in higher regard, but he was also concerned that 'scientist' might suggest less esteemed people of the time with '-ist' endings specifically 'economist' and 'atheist'.

It is funny that some people in the writing/dancing/sculpting/painting/drawing/etcing communities would love to be thought of as the generic term 'artist' while those working in the fields of genetics/biology/chemistry/geology/thermodynamics/etcics cringe at the label 'scientist'.

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Jamie Johnston

at 16:56 on 2010-05-23Although there's also a fun sort of tongue-in-cheek 'reclaiming' (and simultaneously 'pointing out how unhelpfully broad a term it is') thing going on, at least among internetty science-fans if not among professional science-doers, saying things like 'Let's do Science on this!'

Which in turn tempts me to start saying things like 'Stand back: I'm going to do Arts!'

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http://roisindubh211.livejournal.com/

at 03:46 on 2010-05-24This line makes me crack up:

Watch out it is 1984 all over again.

Has this person actually read 1984? I wonder where he/she gets the fascism-biology connection? Is Big Brother supposed to be created in a lab?

Seriously- you're spoilt for choice for science gone OUT OF CONTROL in literature, from Frankenstein to Jurassic Park, for goodness sakes, and they pick 1984?

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http://mmoa.livejournal.com/

at 12:57 on 2010-05-24I actually find it a little ironic that one of the more reasonable responses to this has come from the Vatican itself who have officially declared this advance as 'interesting':

http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/05/22/vatican.synthetic.cell/index.html?hpt=T3

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Arthur B

at 13:03 on 2010-05-24I think after the whole geocentrism/heliocentrism thing the Vatican

really

doesn't want to get caught out again when it comes to making statements about science.

Except where it comes to

condoms

, in which case they'll endorse any pseudoscientific bollocks which supports their position.

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Andrew Currall

at 18:26 on 2010-05-24I don't think I share your dislike for "scientist". Yes, it has rather a broad scope, and yes, it is often used to create an air of authority that it shouldn't actually create (anyone can claim to be one, many with some legitimacy), but I don't see that it's any worse than "geneticist"- it's just a bit less specific. It does mean something, and is generally so far as I can see used more or less correctly. It's certainly no worse than "artist".

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Jamie Johnston

at 18:49 on 2010-05-24Deleted my second comment because I seem to have written it without reading Dan's response to my first one, hence it made no sense. But anyway, @ Dan: yes, I hadn't gathered that. So in fact they haven't really created a new individual, they've just, er. Um. Made an individual different?

Also, @ Róisín (if you don't mind me using that as if it were your name, even though it probably isn't, simply because it's a name): Yes, and another ludicrous thing about that is that the phrase 'it is 1984 all over again' (rather than the more obvious 'it's like 1984') actually draws attention to the fact that

1984

never even happened the first time. In fact the problem with people ever invoking

1984

in a 'we're heading into totalitarian hell' way is that the main thing about

1984

is that the year 1984 came and went and there was no totalitarian hell.

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Arthur B

at 19:11 on 2010-05-24

In fact the problem with people ever invoking 1984 in a 'we're heading into totalitarian hell' way is that the main thing about 1984 is that the year 1984 came and went and there was no totalitarian hell.

Can't agree here. The main thing about the title of 1984 is that it's completely arbitrary - Orwell had wanted to go with 1948 but his publishers considered that a bit too bleak even considering the subject matter.

The main thing about the

content

of 1984 is that it is actually timeless* and dismissing it because it didn't come about on some arbitrary schedule is rote repetition of

the

most annoying misconception about science fiction ever devised by man - namely, that it's a predictive genre and individual works become invalid if their predictions don't actually come to pass.

Jamie, I am disappoint.

* It is, in fact, literally timeless - there's no reason to assume that the year the novel takes place in is in fact 1984. The Party could have added in or blotted out centuries of history if it so chose, or indeed keep recycling the year 1984 over and over again for shits and giggles.)

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Andy G

at 19:14 on 2010-05-24

Can't agree here. The main thing about the title of 1984 is that it's completely arbitrary - Orwell had wanted to go with 1948 but his publishers considered that a bit too bleak even considering the subject matter.

Isn't that an urban myth? I thought the title was actually based on a rather bleak poem his wife wrote for a 1934 school competition imagining life in 50 years' time.

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Arthur B

at 19:31 on 2010-05-24Anthony Burgess was fond of the 1948 idea. The usual explanation I've seen is that he just switched the last two digits of the publication year. According to the intro to the Modern Classics version he did consider several several years for the title. Not heard the poem explanation before.

Either way, the point is that Orwell wasn't predicting an inevitable slippery slope to utter totalitarianism by 1984, he was suggesting a constant threat of totalitarianism that

any

generation could succumb to. There's no vaccine against dictatorship and no society immune to degeneration, we can't pat ourselves on the back and say we've saved ourselves from it just because we got past one particularly overhyped year.

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Andy G

at 19:42 on 2010-05-24@ Arthur B:

His former wife Eileen O'Shaughnessy wrote a poem called "End of the Century, 1984" (which only came to light after Burgess had come up with his theory). I can't actually find it online but it's meant to be fairly bleak and dystopian. It seems to me a more plausible influence, as it seems a bit arbitrary to just swap numbers.

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Arthur B

at 20:48 on 2010-05-24Thanks!

(The working title, apparently, was

The Last Man In Europe

...)

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Jamie Johnston

at 21:58 on 2010-05-24@ Arthur: Fair point, I am mostly wrong. In related news, I am not entirely wrong because I also partly meant something else, namely that people who say 'it's just like

1984

' are often using it precisely as a predictive exercise, their implied reasoning being, for example, 'people in positions of authority are using euphemisms, this is a bit like newspeak, therefore totalitarian hell is imminent'. In other words they treat

1984

like a less cryptic and more secular version of Revelations.

Also I haven't heard people having that misconception about science fiction before, so I deny that I have had a derivative fail and insist that I be given full credit for an original work of fail. :)

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Arthur B

at 22:22 on 2010-05-24

In other words they treat 1984 like a less cryptic and more secular version of Revelations.

This is very true, though to be fair I wonder whether Orwell didn't at least partially intend it to be like that, or at very least a spotter's guide to general symptoms of totalitarianism - between Winston Smith's diary, Goldstein's book, and O'Brien's speeches in room 101, you've pretty much got an easily-grasped analysis of the sort of traits you can expect a totalitarian society (or one heading in said direction) to exhibit.

I think it is sometimes correct to say that a situation is "just like 1984", but only if it shows the actual signs Orwell wants us to watch out for. So, widespread censorship, pervasive surveillance, a culture of informants, brazen propaganda, that sort of thing, especially when several signs are seen in combination with the others. It gets ludicrous when one of the more minor elements (like Newspeak), occurring in isolation, is used to argue that the entire package is unfolding in real life.

It's kind of like Godwin's Law - it's not actually bad to say someone is acting like a Nazi if they are in fact an antisemite and a fascist. Likewise, it's not actually bad to say "It's just like 1984" when, for example, you're protesting against people being spirited away in the middle of the night to secret prisons in far-flung parts of the world to be tortured for information on enemies of the state.

Applying it to biochemical advances is pathetic, though. Haven't they ever heard of

Brave New World

? ;)

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Andy G

at 23:16 on 2010-05-24I think I'd quibble a bit with the idea that Newspeak is a minor element!

On the other hand, I do remember a Telegraph article that mentioned how Big Brother imposed metric units (one of the guys in the pub grumbles about it at some point) ... that's what I call distorting a minor element!

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Arthur B

at 23:35 on 2010-05-24I think Newspeak is significant in the novel, but I don't think it's actually so useful in analysing IRL social trends to see whether things are drifting towards authoritarianism - in particular, I think Newspeak as depicted in the novel is the sort of thing which you could only really successfully accomplish if you'd already established utter totalitarian control over a society (which is why in the novel it was only in its emergent stages, and normal English was only just beginning to be phased out).

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Dan H

at 13:49 on 2010-05-25

It does mean something, and is generally so far as I can see used more or less correctly. It's certainly no worse than "artist".

The point being, though, that you don't say "ARTISTS DO X" every time somebody with an arts degree does something.

"Artist's thriller trilogy becomes posthumous bestseller"

"Economic downturn may continue, say artists"

"Viking settlement lasted into 17th century, artists discover"

It's just completely stupid.

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Dan H

at 13:50 on 2010-05-25

@ Dan: yes, I hadn't gathered that. So in fact they haven't really created a new individual, they've just, er. Um. Made an individual different?

Yes, pretty much.

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Andy G

at 01:33 on 2010-05-26

@ Dan: yes, I hadn't gathered that. So in fact they haven't really created a new individual, they've just, er. Um. Made an individual different?

It's nano-augmentation! Deus Ex here we come!

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Rami

at 03:54 on 2010-05-26

The point being, though, that you don't say "ARTISTS DO X" every time somebody with an arts degree does something.

Of course, bearing in mind that the separation between "science" degrees and "arts" degrees is not AFAIK seen in the same light (or referred to in the same terms) in North America, the word "scientist" is used much more for someone whose profession is in scientific research. Which makes it rather less ridiculous. Just like the headline "Artists launch new show at museum" wouldn't be completely ridiculous even if it did conflate painters, sculptors, filmmakers and performing poets.

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Andrew Currall

at 12:50 on 2010-05-26"Artist" doesn't mean "someone with an art degree" any more than "scientist" means "someone with a science degree". It refers to one's profession (or possibly hobby), not training. Historians/archaeologists are not artists (not are they usually scientists); neither are economists. Authors are, and I admit use of "artist" in place of "author" is unlikely. But it isn't wrong, nor do I see any problem with it.

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Dan H

at 13:07 on 2010-05-26

"Artist" doesn't mean "someone with an art degree" any more than "scientist" means "someone with a science degree".

That's sort of my point, that's *exactly* what "scientist" means - it's the only possible meaning. It *isn't* a legitimate job description.

Rami's right that it's used *colloquially* (both in the UK and in the US) to mean "people who work in scientific research" but this is simply incorrect - just as it would be incorrect to refer to people who do research in Arts subjects as "artists".

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Rami

at 17:47 on 2010-05-26

It refers to one's profession (or possibly hobby), not training.

I can't get to

OED Online

but according to

Merriam-Webster's definition

training is exactly what it refers to.

Possibly some of the confusion here is that "artist" and "scientist" are not used (or defined) similarly: an artist is “

someone who professes and practises a creative art

”, not just someone trained in it. Neither colloquial nor formal usage, AFAIK, refers to arts graduates (or, in USian, liberal arts majors) as "artists".

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Dan H

at 18:44 on 2010-05-26

Possibly some of the confusion here is that "artist" and "scientist" are not used (or defined) similarly

I think you're right - artist was a bad example.

Basically the term "scientist" describes a broad, heterogenous group of people, but the media like to invoke "Scientists" (a subtly distinct, and wholly fictional class of person) to lend legitimacy to otherwise implausible claims, which is why it bugs me.

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Andy G

at 03:30 on 2010-05-27OED says a scientist is someone who is studying or has expert knowledge of a scientific field. It would still sound a little odd to me though to call someone a scientist purely on the basis that they happen to know science. It may not be a job description, but it surely implies something about what that person *does*.

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Guy

at 06:25 on 2010-05-27Surely the now agreed-upon definition of "scientist" is "someone who lies about how magnets work."?

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Arthur B

at 15:37 on 2010-05-27@Guy: Sounds like these geneticists have been listening to the Insane

Clone

Posse!!!!!!!

Geddit?

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Guy

at 08:54 on 2010-05-28@Arthur - if someone wanted to create a cover band for them (which itself would probably require some kind of Miracle, or possibly a life-form artificially created to have inhuman levels of bad taste) that would be a great name for it. :)

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Jamie Johnston

at 23:08 on 2010-05-28Aha! Allow me to shoe-horn in the totally irrelevant fact that the best tribute-band name ever is:

aRe wE theM?

And, to return to the subject, although we bid a sad farewell to the exciting idea of synthetic life-forms taking over the world, there are glimmers of a slightly more plausible but still entertaining thriller plot in which it's actually not the media but Venter himself who is exaggerating the implications of his work in order to justify

an application

to patent every conceivable technology that could arise from making DNA and squirting it into cells. I hear Dan Brown uncapping his pen.

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Robinson L

at 20:30 on 2010-12-18

And if I had a penny for every time I’d seen the words “playing God” I’d be able to get an extra cup of coffee out the vending machine.

Father Chains sat on the roof of the House of Perelandro, staring down at the astonishingly arrogant fourteen-year-old that he little orphan he'd purchased so many years before from the Thiefmaker of Shades' Hill had become. "Some day, Locke Lamora," he said, "some day, you're going to fuck up so magnificently, so ambitiously, so overwhelmingly that the sky will light up and the moons will spin and the gods themselves will shit comets with glee. And I just hope I'm still around to see it." "Oh, please," said Locke. "It'll never happen."

The Lies of Locke Lamora is basically a fantasy-heist novel, but it's also a pleasant breeze through a stale genre (yes, I'm bitter), shorter than the typical eighty million pages and a surprisingly assured and competent debut. I picked it up in Hay on Wye for a sum so ludicrously trifling (a mere one of my English pounds) that it almost felt as if Scott Lynch had come up to me in the street and asked me nicely to read his novel, the consequence of which is that my critical objectivity is shot to buggery but I think I'd still be recommending this if I'd forked out the

requisite 7.99.

Locke Lamora - otherwise known as the Thorn of Camorr - is the leader of a tightly knit group of conmen-thieves known as the Gentleman Bastards. As the novel kicks off, they are in the process of scamming a couple of aristocrats out of a portion of their fortune, coincidentally violating the long-standing Secret Peace that has been negotiated between the criminal underworld and the upper echelons of society. Meanwhile a mysterious personage known as the Grey King is preying upon the thieves of Camorr and forces Locke to participate in his personal vendetta against the city's crimelord Capa Barsavi. Needless to say, events soon spiral massively out of Locke's control and he finds himself caught up in something that threatens not only the people he cares for but the entire stability of the city. The first third of the book is a rompish heist, complete with all the usual twists and turns, but then it twists on its axis becoming a much darker and more serious story, although it never loses the edge of gallows-humour that makes it such a pleasure to read.

The Lies of Locke Lamora is a truly a rootless, bastard child of the genre: there's a fair mixing of Feist, Gavriel Kay, Brust, Miville, Pratchett and Dickens to be found within, to say nothing of the more than passing nods to movies like The Godfather, The Sting, Oceans 11, Scar Face and Goodfellas. It's not flawless, but it's still damn good: a fast-paced, page-turning adventure story set in a complex and intriguing world that doesn't drown you in detail (although I expect the author will soon forget this and commence the deluge). Camorr provides an excellent backdrop for Lamora's exploits: an island city built of Elderglass by a race nobody remembers, it seems to be inspired by 16th century Venice, with all the attendant squalor and decadence. There's definitely world-building going on but its of the subtle kind that successfully creates the impression of a living and very real city without racking up a page count hefty enough to kill a walrus (*cough* Miville *cough*). Lynch's imagination encompasses both beauty and brutality, dancing easily from the banal to the opulent, from frivolity to genuine threat. One of my favourite chapters introduces the fencing master, Don Maranzella in his House of Glass Roses:

"Here was an entire rose garden, wall after all, of perfect petals and stems and thorns, silent and scentless and alive with reflected fire, for it was all carved from Elderglass, a hundred thousand blossoms, perfect down to the tiniest thorn ... ... each wall of roses was actually transparent .... Yet there were patches of genuine colour here and there in the hearts of the sculptures, swirled masses of reddish-brown transulence like clouds of rust-coloured smoke frozen in ice. These clouds were human blood.

I can forgive Lynch for lingering in his fairytale garden of blood-thirsty roses and his farmer-turned-fencing master is a wonderful antidote to all those artistic gentlemanly types with their flourishing rapiers. This chapter seems to illustrate Lynch at his very best - the strange, sculpted roses and the introduction of the fencing master, the shift from pretension to pragmatism, from description to dialogue, from fantastical lyricism to dark humour and the sudden stripped-down truth about what Jean Tannen has really come to learn:

"Jean, you misunderstand." Maranzella kicked idly at the toy rapier and it clattered across the tiles of the roof top. "Those prancing little pants-wetters come here to learn the colourful and gentlemanly art of fencing, with its many sporting limitations and its proscriptions against dishonourable engagements. You, on the other hand," he said, as he turned to give Jean a firm but friendly poke in the centre of his forehead, "you are going to learn how to kill men with a sword."

The book itself is interestingly structured - it reminds me rather of Heroes, in fact. It consists of a succession of short chapters building to a mini-climax, followed by a brief interlude, either a tale of the City and its Gods, or a flashback to the early years and training of Locke and his gang. This actually works really well. The interludes are generally absorbing enough that, even though I was eager to find out what was going to happen next, I didn't skip them or resent reading them ... at least not very much. Furthermore, most of the interludes, although not precisely relevant, often offer an illumination on future events, thus rewarding the alert reader. And it does solve the perennial fantasy book problem of how to introduce the hero to the reader and show his gradual development from child to adult without spending the first five hundred pages of the novel narrating every little moment of the hero's childhood in agonisingly tedious detail. Part of me, however, couldn't quite shake the conviction that it was a cheap trick. It's a very obvious way to build tension and create anxiety and uncertainty in the reader and occasionally interferes with the pacing at critical moments.

Lynch's is a self-consciously "dark" world; there's an awful lot of swearing and torture, and the central characters are, of course, thieves and murderers. But since we only ever see them stealing from the rich and murdering those who thoroughly deserve it and their loyalty to each other is unswerving, there's never really any question of their being admirable characters deep down. This is not a problem per se; but the book is about as morally ambiguous as my Grandmother:

"I only steal because my dear old family needs the money to live!" Locke Lamora made this proclamation with his wine glass held high ... ... the others began to jeer. "Liar!" they chorused "I only steal because this wicked world won't let me work an honest trade!" Calo cried, hoisting his own glass. "LIAR!" "I only steal," said Jean, "because I've temporarily fallen in with bad company." "LIAR!" At last the ritual came to Bug; the boy raised his glass a bit shakily and yelled, "I only steal because it's heaps of fucking fun!" "BASTARD!"

Stealing may be wrong but it's also big and clever and all the cool kids are doing it. The exuberance and loyalty of the Gentleman Bastards is charming and it's impossible not to root for them. On the other hand, I am conscious of a vague dissatisfaction with Locke. The book is careful to assert that he is skinny and unremarkable and a poor fighter but he is also a consummate conman with incredible reserves of tenacity and courage, he is cunning, daring and quick-thinking, and there is no sacrifice he will not consider to preserve the safety of his friends and loved ones. He can be ruthless when necessary, he has the survival instincts of a rat, he's reckless occasionally but only in a way we're meant to think is cool and, on top of all this, he has a conscience and listens to it. Needless to say his origins are shrouded in mystery (I'm sure this will be Very Important later) and his creator is head over heels in love with him. I came dangerously close to finding the character annoying and if Lynch isn't careful he's going to be unbearable a couple of books down the line.

Speaking of the dreaded "couple of books down the line" The Lies of Locke Lamora does a reasonable job of offering a coherent and contained plot arc, but there are several dangling threads (the most irritating of which is Locke's love interest, a woman occasionally mentioned but never introduced) presumably left there to wet the appetite for future books. The mighty internet tells me there will be seven of these, which triggers all my cringe mechanisms. This cannot end well. Has nobody learned anything from JK Rowling?

The second book of the septad, Red Seas Under Red Skies, has recently been released - having enjoyed the first book has much as I did, I'm now terrified to read the second in case it sucks. I guess I'll have to wait until it's available for 1 again. But, in the meantime, you could do worse than taking a look at The Lies of Locke Lamora. It's not perfect - Mary Sue-ish main character, a plot necessitated, damn near omnipotent bondsmage - and I understand it has received some criticism for its modern-sounding speech but, quite frankly, I found that contributed to the lively, irreverent tone of the book. But it is a fun, fast-paced read in a ponderous genre and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

PS - This is really childish (and has nothing to do with the review at all) but I think I also need to point out that Scott Lynch looks like this --->: 

Arthur B

at 17:09 on 2007-11-14I was toying with doing a Reading Canary for this one, and might still do if I get around to picking up

Red Seas

, but you seem to have covered most of the bases. I agree that criticising the book for modern-sounding speech is reaching a little - if an author's simply more comfortable writing dialogue in a modern style then I'd rather they did that than attempt to try Ye Olde Speeche and fail horribly. I also agree that Lynch is a little too in love with Lamora, and indeed most of the book's fans are a little too much in love with Lamora; the fun of the book comes when Locke screws up horribly, and if you look at it objectively he isn't actually as nice a guy as Lynch thinks he is. That's why the book works, of course: the big central conflict is about accepting a rotten compromise which causes suffering for a few but provides peace and security for many, or rejecting that compromise knowing full well that rejection means no peace or security for anyone, and it's good that the representatives of both sides have their good and bad points.

The big criticism I'd have is that all the flashback bits to their childhood simply weren't as interesting to me as the main story: I'd much rather have a book half the length without the flashbacks. It doesn't matter whether Jean was taught swordplay by a farmer-turned-toff in a blood garden or by a toff-turned-farmer in a turnip patch: I can't think of any instance in the main storyline where it becomes at all relevant. There is one flashback which nicely foreshadows the final conflict, but it does so by basically explaining what Locke's tactic is going to be, so the ending is a bit obvious. Also, yes, big smirking long-haired Scott Lynch wants to kiss big smirking long-haired Locke, a meeting of shit-eating grins which thankfully cannot actually occur in real life.

Thing is, I'm not sure whether I'll ever actually get around to picking up

Red Seas

. I picked up

Lies

second-hand too, and while it's a fun and consistently not-crap read it isn't quite good enough to force me to go buy the new one. I'm not convinced that the character merits more than one book about him.

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empink

at 00:01 on 2007-11-15@ Arthur

For now, I'd say not to bother with Red Seas. It's also a fairly consitently not-crap read, but imho the author's love for his character really burns strong in the sequel. I don't know why I couldn't put my finger on it when I read it, but Kyra hits the nail on the head here. He really, really loves this character of his, and it means he gets to do all kinds of improbably cool stuff.

Now, while that was fun in the first book, it starts to wear on you in the second one. The dialogue needs to be beaten with the boring stick (I swear, everything everyone says is so witty that you WISH someone would say something dumb at some point. Which they don't. ARGH), and the plot is just...stretchy, in terms of suspension of disbelief.

All I know to say is that, having read Red Seas, I'm not going to jones for the rest of the series anywhere as near as I am jonesing for one or two others, because it probably won't be worth it.

PS, Kyra, the mysterious woman never actually shows up in Red Seas. But she does get mentioned. A LOT. *facepalm*

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Wardog

at 09:22 on 2007-11-15ACtually my copy of Lies was brand, spanking new and still one pound - that's why I'm so smug about it. I LOVE you Hay on Wye!

Ahem, anyway. I actually found Locke irritatingly virtuous. Even when he's trying to get a suit of clothes, and he drops an innocent waiter into the shit, he still takes time extract said waiter *and* give him a purse containing more money he's ever held in his life. Until that point I was actually impressed that he'd completely fucked up the waiter's life - it made him less sympathetic but I think, perhaps, more interesting?

I genuinely didn't mind the flashbacks and interludes; they weren't *quite* as interesting as the main plot but I didn't find them sufficiently tedious that they detracted from it too badly. And I was oddly into Jean Tannen (even though he's basically just a side-kick protector for Locke)so I really loved the stuff in the House of Glass Roses; also it is relevant because it "explains" why Jean can take out the two shark-baiting sisters without getting completely mullered.

And thanks for the warnings, Empink, I very very nearly bought a full-price copy of Red Seas the other day and I'm now *so glad* I didn't. I'm not sure I can stand another book of love-interest build-up because you just *know* she won't live up to it. And I don't wish to see Lynch consummating his relationship with Locke in an orgy of cool stunts.

I did find Lies genuinely witty but mainly because the characters tended to say something deeply pragmatic or macabre or just plain inappropriate at what would otherwise be very serious moments. It helped me get through the nasty bits (becuase I'm a wimp) and it also tended to have a nice edge of desperation to it - whereas I don't think I *want* a dazzling virtuoso wit-fest from the Book II.

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Arthur B

at 12:19 on 2007-11-15Empink:

I'd been wondering what I'd found weird about the dialogue in

Lies

, but you've put your finger on it: everybody's a smartarse. I can remember a couple of times where I was having trouble following conversations, because everyone's dialogue is so similar in tone and delivery that there's little differentiating them. It feels less like a bunch of different people are having a conversation and more like Lynch has a bunch of sockpuppets that he's using to tell a story - you never forget that it's Lynch behind all of them. (Still, at least it is monotonous in a clever and witty and entertaining way as opposed to monotonous in a consistently dumb and boring way.)

Kyra:

You're right about the overvirtuousness. I was remembering the bit where he wrecks the waiter's life, but not the part where he makes it all better. I think the worst thing he does in the entire book is play a practical joke on the secret police (you know, the one with the boats full of shit).

I like Jean too, but I worry that I only like him because he's a floating bit of driftwood in an ocean of Locke; he's the only other interesting character we spend an extended amount of time with (though I also liked the Capa's daughter and the Grey King and the head of the secret police), so he's a welcome relief from an unending shower of Lamora-love. As far as the Glass Roses stuff explaining the shark sisters fight, I consider "Jean is a rock-hard son of a bitch" to be a more than adequate explanation for why he beat them. Jean being a rock-hard son of a bitch is neatly demonstrated in the main story by, well, Jean beating the shark sisters...

Both of ye:

I think it's fairly obvious at this point that the Mysterious Love Interest is, in fact, Scott Lynch in a dress.

Either that, or she'll be the big bad at the end of the series.

Possibly the big bad will be Scott Lynch in a dress.

The intersection of Lynchsmirk and Lamoracock providing the cure to the world's ills.

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Wardog

at 14:18 on 2007-11-15I actually thought the dialogue in Lies was just about cope-able with - it's true that everyone sounds nearly the same but that genuinely didn't bother me except occasionally when Locke was conversing with arisocrats and then it grated somewhat. Dona Sofia, for example, is clearly meant to have a distinct and feisty personality with her alchemy and everything - but I never really got much from her. I think I was just glad to have snappy, modern-sounding dialogue for a change, instead of ponderous faux-medieval stuff.

But Jean was a fat, weepy merchant's son - he had to go from that to RHSOFAB somehow; sure, you didn't need to really know how but since these two sisters were meant to be *all that* it wouldn't have made sense for some thiefly-brawler to be able to take them out.

I still feel positive about Lies, despite its flaws. You were obviously considerably more irritated by the Locke-Lovin' than I was. And Lynch isn't the most talented ventriloquist but I didn't feel him in the background as much as you did either. I shouldn't have put up the picture, I think I've just generated undue hostility by drawing attention to the fact he looks like the sort of person we know.

But I genuinely think Lies stands as a good fantasy read; future books, well, we'll see...

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Wardog

at 14:21 on 2007-11-15Also, I think Arthur is just being discriminating because Lynch isn't a hottie like

Gene Wolfe

;)

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Arthur B

at 14:57 on 2007-11-15

But Jean was a fat, weepy merchant's son - he had to go from that to RHSOFAB somehow; sure, you didn't need to really know how but since these two sisters were meant to be *all that* it wouldn't have made sense for some thiefly-brawler to be able to take them out.

Yeah, but we only know that because of the flashbacks, so Lynch ends up setting up a problem which he then feels that he needs to solve with more flashbacks. It'd be more interesting, to me, if he'd established the sonofabitchness of Jean early on, and then dropped hints through the main action that Jean actually comes from a softer, more pudding-like background. I honestly don't think it matters at all, to

Lies

, how Jean got hard - I think most readers can happily accept that a life on the streets as a criminal will tend to make people either sneaky or fighty, regardless of their background.

My worry is that Lynch felt the need to dump all the backstory with Chains and the farmer-turned-toff and the farmer-who-ended-up-a-farmer-again because he's got this big backstory he wants to hint at which is suddenly going to becoming very relevant in the later novels, in a kind of "James Potter was mean to Snape at school" kind of way. And who's willing to bet that this is going to tie in with Long Lost Bint somehow?

Don't worry about the photo, I'd probably be saying the same sort of things about the novel even if Lynch looked like my beloved Wolfe - although it's a lot funnier knowing that Lynch looks like that. I do think it's a fun, likeable novel and worth reading for entertainment; most of my problems stem from my impression that Lynch wants us to think it's something more than that. Then again, maybe I've been spoiled by

Vlad Taltos

, who pushes similar buttons and whose writer looks like

the bastard son of Terry Pratchett and Frank Zappa

.

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Wardog

at 15:12 on 2007-11-15Jesus CHRIST! *faints*

Yeah, I think you might be right about Jean; I guess it depends how much we care that this stuff is going to become Meaningful later. JKR has soured me on that sort of thing forever.

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Arthur B

at 15:38 on 2007-11-15Is that you swooning before the dreamy gaze of Brust?

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Alice

at 22:21 on 2013-08-28Necro-ing this post, since I've finally gotten round to reading the book after finding the post via the random button.

I mostly more or less enjoyed it, in an "oh, must you really, Scott Lynch?" sort of way - I actually enjoyed the backstory parts more than the main plot, perhaps because while Lynch SUPER-UNSUBTLY wrote out Locke's love interest right from the beginning, at least he didn't have her murdered and delivered to her father in a barrel of horse urine in order to kick off the main plot.

(That was the bit that really made me roll my eyes and give up on enjoying the book in anything other than a superficial way. Lynch slightly redeems himself by having the head of the secret police be a badass old lady with a cane, but I really liked Nazca, I thought she was cool, so I was extra annoyed when she got fridged.)

I really like Jean Tannen, though, so part of me is tempted to at least give book 2 a go.

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Robinson L

at 15:30 on 2016-10-05Listened to this one on audiobook several months back, and enjoyed it as a fantasy heist/adventure yarn; it was quite fun. I hope it wasn't Lynch's intention for me to read any deeper meaning into it, because I really doubt it would hold up to that kind of scrutiny, and it would raise a bunch of awkward questions I don't think he's prepared to answer.

I was a bit disappointed by the ending, because the best bits of the book are generally when somebody is executing a masterful con: whereas Locke spends the last few chapters of

Lies

alternately pleading, cajoling, and punching his way to victory.

I guess I didn't mind too much Locke being both an authorial darling and a hyper-competent master criminal, because, as Arthur pointed out in his original comment, he regularly screws up, finds himself outsmarted or outmaneuvered, and generally gets the everloving shit kicked out of him and/or reduced to a blubbering wreck. For me, this was enough to make the balance tip over into “enjoyable” protagonist rather than “insufferable,” though I realize folks' mileage will vary.

I also really liked the character of Father Chains. The samey-ness of all the characters' dialogue has been brought up already, and I just kind of shrugged it off—however, even with that, I feel like Chains got in an inordinate amount of memorable lines. Also, for some reason, the character of a hard-cussin' scoundrel priest really appeals to me. (Technically, Locke is one, too, but his priestliness is kept mostly to the background.)

I was also disappointed they didn't wind up causing the death of the Bonds Mage (perhaps by accident). As arc plots go, “high class thieves on the run from an immensely powerful and vindictive wizards' guild” sounds pretty solid, and could justify the seven book length to show how our heroes go from fleecing the city's upper class to taking on said wizards' guild and winning.

Like Alice, I disliked that the book fridges Nazca in such an ignominious fashion to kick off the main plot, although I was somewhat mollified that the villain then proceeded to wipe out the rest of the Clan Barsavi in similarly brutal fashion, meaning she wasn't the One Big Death, she was just the first major casualty (plus, three quarters of Locke's chums, also all male, go down shortly thereafter). Again, though, I recognize not everyone is going to be satisfied with this, nor am I arguing they should be.

For whatever it means, in the third book, Nazca is the only member of the Barsavi family who Jean deems worthy of mentioning among the list of people they've lost when he's reeling it off to Locke.

Speaking of deaths, I was extremely relieved that Jean Tannen survived the Grey King's betrayal: Locke really needed a sidekick for the story to work, and Jean was easily the best of the lot. His friendship with Locke is great, and one of my favorite parts of the book was actually the flashback to when he first joined the crew, after Locke's initial attack of sibling rivalry, where Jean asks Locke to help him steal stuff he can use as a death offering for his deceased parents, and Locke asks Jean to help him learn how to use an abacus*. So cute.

*This after Father Chains uses Jean's superiority with an abacus to humiliate Locke and demonstrate why Jean is a useful addition to the crew.

So that part was good, and I didn't mind the other flashbacks so much, though I might have if I'd read through the book instead of listening to it on audio. What I did mind was Lynch dropping a chapter about the Spider tumbling to Locke's latest scheme and setting a trap for him right after the cliffhanger chapter where he's been thrown into the river in a barrel of horse urine and left for dead. First and most obviously because it's a transparently artificial way to hold off resolving said cliffhanger (unlike the flashbacks, which happen in every chapter); but second and also perniciously, because it sucked so much of the tension out of later scenes with Locke trying to reestablish his Lucas Fehrwight scam—the main source of tension was now “will Locke fall into the Spider's trap, and if so, how will he escape it?” so all the stuff with him stealing an appropriate set of clothes felt like so much wasted time before we got back to the next big story question. And that's also unfortunate because I think the clothing scam was actually one of the strongest parts of the book.

Speaking of which, I see what you mean about Locke being “irritatingly virtuous,” though I didn't mind it much, either. The only part which really got me was the way he immediately opted for saving all the high-bread toffs of Camorr at the risk of missing his chance for revenge against the Grey King. I get that he's supposed to be a noble rogue character, but that part struck me as too altruistic to fit his personality. I would expect him at least to be seriously tempted to leave the aristocrats to their fate while he goes and settles the score with the guy who murdered all but one of his best friends. But no, in his mind, it isn't even a choice, and I don't understand why.

I think it should be noted, though, that Locke also does some really screwed up shit which he's never really called on (a major reason I resist taking the books at all seriously). This is a case in point:

he drops an innocent waiter into the shit, he still takes time extract said waiter *and* give him a purse containing more money he's ever held in his life.

Well, yeah, but he *also* gets the poor sod permanently exiled from the only home he's ever had, presumably cut off from friends, family, everyone and everything he knows. Now, for some people, I suppose this could be the best opportunity of their lives—for others, it would be a kind of hell. For all we know, that waiter might well have committed suicide a couple years later, unable to cope with his life's circumstances.

Other crimes of Master Lamora which go unaddressed: murdering the Grey King's assassin after getting information out of him by shutting him up in a cellar and setting fire to it. True, the man had just killed one of his and Jean's best friends and was complicit the conspiracy to kill them all, but that's an incredibly cruel way to dispatch him.

And biggest of all, he manipulates the Camorri top brass into demolishing the Grey King's escape ship and consigning the ~15 person crew to what I also recall being described as a particularly horrible death. True, they were all the Grey King's lackeys, but they were just there to help him get away with the loot (and not to infect half the city with awful plague, as Locke claims), which hardly seems to make them deserving of such a grisly execution.

I let all this pass because I take the books in a “fun adventure” mindset; if I took them seriously, I'd be forced to conclude that Locke Lamora is a terrible person in ways the books themselves aren't prepared to explore.

I was not a fan of the Wheel of Time books, probably because I came to them in my twenties with my tastes already fairly developed. I was never able to get past the opening of the second book, and those of you who've known me for ages I'm sure absorbed my criticism and invective years ago. I once wrote at excruciating length upon the weaknesses of the books as I perceived them, and while I thought it was extremely clever and somehow necessary at the time, the years since have drastically mellowed my taste for mocking the work of other authors who aren't huge assholes in person or pushing a distasteful agenda with their work. About the best I can say for my mosquito bites is that I sincerely hope Jordan himself never had them called to his attention. Something tells me he would have given them the eye roll they deserved.

And the sheer decency of it has sort of shamed me to such an extent (especially since I am a non-achiever who hangs about on the internet criticising other people's work) that I can hardly bring myself to review Red Seas Under Red Skies, especially since my attempt to write about The Lies of Locke Lamora degenerated into a (semi-harmless) mock-fest of Scott Lynch's hair. By the way the important word in that sentence was "hardly." With this mind and all due humility, here are some thoughts on Red Thingies Over/Under Red Other Thingies, which I shall hereafter refer to as RSURS for the sake of my sanity. It's the second book in the Gentleman Bastard sequence which will, I understand, eventually form a septet. I have to say, this idea distresses me. Not only has Harry Potter soured me on the number seven for life but, given the fact the fantasy genre generally can't cope with trilogies, the idea of a septet seems utterly ludicrous to me. I mean, what do you have to say that takes seven books? Seriously?

For the moment, however, Scott Lynch seems to have something to say. Ultimately there's no point in reading RSURS if you haven't read The Lies of Locke Lamora not because it doesn't almost stand alone but because familiarity with the background, the setting and the characters deepens the experience of reading. To give it due credit: RSURS is reasonably satisfying on its own terms. You can feel the slow gathering of plot upon the horizon like distant clouds (and fear the coming storm) and there are some massive danglers just left hanging in a deliberately taunting and irritating fashion but, hey, thems the breaks with this kind of thing. And, as in Lies, the mysterious Sabetha, the apparent love of Locke's life, is alluded to but remains absent: for fuck's sake, Lynch, stop it. You know she's just going to be a total let down after a build up like this.

The problems evident in Lies are evident in RSURS, only slightly moreso because you don't have the novelty factor of being a first book to distract you from them. If you didn't like Locke the first time round, you won't like him here because he's exactly the same and still, some might argue, something of a Mary Sue or the male equivalent thereof. Although I don't personally object to the love affair Scott Lynch is tenderly enacting with his (anti)hero, I do struggle somewhat with the character. As I think I said in my review of Lies, he's absolutely the nicest bastard you could ever hope to meet: he never harms or kills anybody who doesn't thoroughly deserve it, his supposedly long-dead conscience miraculously reappears whenever he's confronted by any sort of cruelty or injustice and his unswerving and self-sacrificing loyalty to his friends is a virtue of such magnitude that it eclipses everything remotely unsympathetic about him. It shouldn't, but that's the way fiction works: if your character cares about the same people as the reader, it doesn't really matter how that character behaves, they're always going to garner a degree of support and approval.

I wouldn't mind this so much if I didn't have the feeling that Locke is supposed to be a shady character for a dark world. Perhaps I have the wrong end of the stick and Locke was never meant to be anything but a big bleeding heart beneath a thin veneer of survivalist criminality but I don't think so. I think the problem with Locke Lamora is that he's neither enough of one thing nor its opposite: he's neither selfish enough to be a convincing anti-hero nor virtuous enough to be a convincing hero. I know part of his shtick is his shifting sense of self and I'm not averse to complicated, contradictory characters but I find Locke incoherent rather than complex. I'm genuinely uncertain as to what Lynch is trying to do with the character or what we're meant to think. I'm not saying he doesn't do terrible things - he mutilates someone (who, admittedly, deserves it) in the first book - but everything he does that's vile and shocking is excusable whereas everything he does that's compassionate is extraordinary. For example, in RSURS, he and Jean, hanging out a decadent casino called the Sinspire, witness an entertainment in which a young nobleman, unable to pay his debts, has to survive in cage of stiletto wasps. Needless to say he doesn't and Locke secretly makes a blessing over the young man's forgotten corpse:

"Crooked Warden," Locke muttered under his breath, speaking quickly, "a glass poured on the ground for a stranger without friends. Lord of gallants and fools, ease this man's passage to the Lady of the Long Silence. This was a hell of a way to die. Do this for me and I'll try not to ask for anything for a while. I really do mean that this time."

There is no reason for this scene to be in the book (not that it isn't cool) - there are plenty examples of the upper classes being cruel and bloodthirsty to make the point and if the stiletto wasps are at all relevant beyond providing atmosphere they're certainly not to this book. In fact, its only purpose is to remind us that Locke Lamora is great and to show him, thief and conman that he is, being humane in the face of the world's inhumanity.

Unlike some of the reviews I've read, I've never had a problem with the snappy, modern dialogue and the very modern obscenity. In fact, I genuinely relish it. Unfortunately, it was during RSURS that I realised something that had passed me by in the first book: it's the only kind of dialogue Lynch can write. Everyone sounds the same. Pirates, noblemen, thieves, priests Locke, Jean: they're interchangeable. Witty but interchangeable.

"And now, my dear professional pessimist," said Locke... "my worry merchant, my tireless font of doubt and derision ... what do you have to say to that? "Oh very little to be sure... it's so hard to think, overawed as I am with the sublime genius of your plan." "That bears some resemblance to sarcasm." "Gods, forefend," said Jean. "You wound me! Your inexpressible criminal virtues have triumphed again, as inevitably as the tides comes and go. I cast myself at your feet and beg for absolution. Yours is the genius that nourishes the heart of the world." "And now you're-" "If only there was a leper handy," interrupted Jean, "so you could lay your hands on him and magically heal him-" "Oh you're just farting out of your mouth because you're jealous."

And so on. And here we have Jean talking to his ladylove:

"Have you really been practicing on barrels Jerome?" "Barrels. Yes. They never laugh, they never ridicule you and they offer no distractions." "Distractions?" "Barrels don't have breasts." "Ah. So what have you been telling these barrels?" "This bottle of brandy," said Jean, "is still too full for me to begin embarrassing myself like that." "Pretend I'm a barrel then." "Barrels don't have br-" "So I've heard. Find the nerve, Valora." "You want me to pretend that you're a barrel, so I can tell you what I was telling barrels back when I was pretending they were you." "Precisely." "Well ... you have ... you have such hoops as I have never seen in any cask on any ship, such shiny and well-fit hoops-" "Jerome-" "And your staves! Your staves ... so well planned, so tightly fit. You are as fine a cask as I ever seen, you marvellous little barrel. To say nothing of your bung-."

See what I mean?

I think in my review of Lies I commented on the deftness and subtlety of the world building - well, in RSURS, the action has moved from a city made of elderglass to a city consisting of islands made of elderglass. Astonishing. And sadly the delicacy of touch seems to have been replaced by the typical fantasy fiction obsession with geographic detail. It's nowhere near Perdido Street Stationbut, as much as I enjoy Lynch's world, there's a bit too much of this sort of thing:

Tal Verrar, the Rose of the Gods, at the westernmost edge of what the Therin people call the civilised world. If you could stand in thin air a thousand yards above Tal Verrar's tallest towers, or float in lazy circles there like the nations of gulls that infest the city's crevices and rooftops, you would see how its vast, dark islands have given this place its ancient nickname. They whirl outward from the city's heart, a series of crescents steadily increasing in size, like the stylised petals of a rose in an artist's mosaic.

And so on for two or more pages at a time. A bit like this review really.

Also it has to be said, the plot makes no sense whatsoever. It attempts to follow the embedded narrative format of the first book but it feels strained: Lynch occasionally plays with chronology, explaining how events came about after they occur, and offers a few reminiscences but it's noticeably a device now, rather than the most natural vehicle to tell the story. And, like the first book, it begins with Locke and Jean mid-heist only to drag them - reluctant and swearing as ever - into much bigger events, allowing the plot to twist, turn, double back on itself and eventually come full circle in a strangely satisfying manner. Except this time, it turns out that the Archon of Tal Verrar wants them to become ... wait for it ... pirates. Yes. Pirates. Two conmen from the streets of Camorr. Pirates. Now, I know that pirates are just inherently cool and you can't go wrong with them but still, come on. What's next? Locke Lamora and some ninjas? Locke Lamora and zombies? I don't know whether to respect the sheer brass bollocks ludicrousness of it or complain bitterly because it has to be the most spurious excuse for a plot I've ever encountered. And the fact that even main characters complain about the stupidity doesn't actually counteract that stupidity:

"Send us out to sea to find an excuse for you, that's what you said," said Locke. "Send us out to sea. Has your brain swelled against the inside of skull? How the screaming fucking hell do you expect the two of us to raise a bloody pirate armada in a place we've never been and convince it to come merrily die at the hands of the navy that bent it over the table and fucked it in the arse last time."

This is Lynch's latest technique, by the way, one I think he might have borrowed from JK Rowling. He seems have developed a tendency to address the inevitable plot holes of his novels by having his characters draw attention to it. To be honest,

fridge logic

doesn't bother me - I don't care how Buffy the Vampire slayer pays the mortgage on her dead mother's house or how Sydney Bristow circles the globe in half an episode - but attempting to pass it off as anything other than what it is offends me. Having the Archon blackmail Locke and Jean into mustering a pirate armada for political reasons is little more than a blatant excuse for the author to have them messing about with pirates, which is in itself fair enough. However, having Locke and Jean constantly bitching about the insanity of the plan even as they enact it only serves to induce bouts of fridge logic before you're even anywhere near the fridge. It also leads to odd little moments like this:

"Why not?" [said Jean] "Why not? We carry your precious misery with us like a holy fucking relic. Don't talk about Sabetha Belacoros. Don't talk about the plays. Don't talk about Jasmer or Espara or any of the schemes we ran. I lived with her for nine years, same as you, and I've pretended she doesn't fucking exist to avoid upsetting you. Well I'm not you. I'm not content to live like an oath-bond monk. I have a life outside your gods-damned shadow."

Err...actually Jean, you're a sidekick. Haven't you noticed? You actually do not have a life outside Locke Lamora's gods-damned shadow. The more Lynch tries to demonstrate to the reader that Jean is a person in his own right the less convincing it becomes. All it does is illustrate the fact that whatever Jean does on his own account is completely meaningless because his only relevance is tied to his supporting role, a role to which he will always return. His short-lived relationship - although actually moderately engaging, while it lasts - is only further evidence of this. You can see its inevitably tragic conclusion approaching on the horizon like the sails of the good ship Obvious.

The other thing I'm feeling a little bit peeved is Lynch's reliance on a technique he seems to have ganked from Alias. Now, I'm not sure if it continues in the later seasons but the early episodes of Alias always end with a cliff-hanger. And at first I used to get tremendously caught up in them. Oh no, I'd cry, Sydney is hanging from a cliff with only her suspender belt between her and certain death. Oh no, Sydney's rival has locked her in the poison-gas filled vault. Oh no, Sydney is being held at gunpoint by the bad guys. And then I'd insist that we watched another episode to find out what was going to happen, only to be faintly disappointed when the desperate, deadly situation resolved itself harmlessly in about two minutes of screen time. RSURS opens with Locke and Jean caught at crossbow-point on the docks and then, gasp, ever-faithful Jean turns on Locke. The novel then spools backwards in time to show you how they got themselves into this mess and, yes, it's arresting except that it's basically just like Alias, a cliff-hanger critical on the surface but ultimately completely meaningless and wrapped up quicker than a streaker at a tennis match. A couple of similar situations happen over the course of the book and, despite the satisfactory resolution of the plot, there's one left right at the end. I suspect I'd be more interested/frustrated by this Tense and Terrible State Of Affairs if the experience of the rest of the novel hadn't led me to the conviction that it's merely there for affect.

Okay, so I've just written four pages of bitching about RSURS but the fact remains that, despite its flaws, despite everything in it that doesn't quite work for me, I still heartily enjoyed it and very nearly loved it. Pirates, for God's sake, pirates! It's not quite as taut as the first book but once Locke and Jean hit the high seas the pace really picks up and the book becomes wonderful fun, sweeping you along on sheer exuberance and panache. And, damn it all, that's good enough for me. Roll on book three.Themes:

Books

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Arthur B

at 01:09 on 2008-02-02It strikes me that the Gentleman Bastard series embodies a problem I have with lots of fantasy series, namely that one book is really enough. I've felt absolutely no urge to go and read RSURS, and most of the things you point out in the review cement that; sure, it seems to be more of the same, and that's well and good - at least it's not a serious decline. On the other hand, one

Lies of Locke Lamora

is enough for me - having read one book, I don't feel as though anything the other books say can really add anything. (I'm also utterly unconvinced that there's enough juice in the Gentleman Bastards concepts to fill 7 books. I mean, for goodness' sake, he's only on the second book in the series and already he's resorted to pirates.)

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empink

at 02:49 on 2008-02-02@ ArthurB: Forsooth, he *will* go to ninjas next.

You know, I had more faith in this guy. I thought he'd at least 'fess up about Sabetha whatshername, or tie the book back to the first one, or do something other than send Jean and Locke to cavort with pirates for no good reason. It made for fantastic cavorting and rather dull and simplistic reading, though-- I won't be buying any more sequels in hardback, or holding on to them out of guilt either.

Oh, and Kyra, the DIALOGUE. Everyone does sound the same, it's so boring. No one is allowed to be stupid, or say frightening things without twisting themselves into witty shapes and cursing fit to kill themselves. It was all right in the first book, but in RSURS, it starts to look like lack of imagination on Lynch's part.

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Arthur B

at 12:04 on 2008-02-02Yeah, I can think of several points in the first book where I had to start reading a conversation again from the beginning because I lost track of who was who. It's this really weird blind spot in Lynch's writing; he can, when he tries, differentiate between characters in terms of disposition, personality, and so forth, and you can tell that by looking at their actions. (To pick the most obvious example, Jean is far more inclined to charge headlong into a fight like a raging bull than Locke is.) But he's chronically incapable of differentiating them when they're speaking.

I can only assume that he finds dialogue difficult (and to be fair, dialogue

is

difficult), and is trying to compensate by finding a style of dialogue he's quite good at and applying it to everyone.

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Wardog

at 14:23 on 2008-02-04I'm glad the dialogue thing isn't only me ... it's the main problem I have with the series to be honest, despite all my trivial bitching above. After a while, it gets really wearing and the characters all start blurring into each other because I find that it's language rather than behaviour that distinguishes people in books - heh, she says, massively generalising.

I think I must be less bothered by "more of the same" than Arthur is - I genuinely enjoyed both books and I'll happily read more (although I've never splashed out a hardback of either, so the cost of my good will is significantly cheaper than Empink's!) as long as they stay on this kind of level (or get better!). I do find them a nice antidote to ponderous, serious fantasy. I genuinely dig the exuberance and the irreverence.

Also I've been poking about Scott Lynch's personal sites and he seems like a pretty decent, charmingly humble guy...

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Cheriola

at 16:16 on 2014-07-26You know, oddly most of the things you mention didn't bother me at all. Except the utter pointlessness of the opening cliffhanger.

The only thing I did have a problem with is the way Jean shames Locke out of his depression, and Locke keeps apologising for "letting Jean down" in those few weeks for literally the next two years. I mean, in this book, it still reads like he's just mourning/recuperating a little too self-indulgently and maybe like he has a really short bout of alcoholism - but since the next book starts pretty much the same (except Locke has even more good reason to be depressed), and Jean then actually makes a reference to some kind of mental disorder (more something like Freud's innate death wish than depression, but still), it becomes problematic in hindsight. Especially since, either intentionally or not, Locke pretty much reads like a textbook case for bipolar disorder (spending most of each book in a manic phase), if you read all 3 books right after another. So for largely-neurotypical Jean to go "If I can handle our losses, why can't you?" and being sucessful at shaming/angering Locke out of suicidal depressive phases, that's rather problematic in my eyes. I know it fits with the setting that nobody has a clue about modern psychology and how Locke's mood issues are a disease, not willful misbehaviour, but Lynch should find a way to make at least narratively clear that Jean isn't right to do this. Besides, that kind of shaming would just make things worse with a real depressive person.

By the way, I'm fairly sure Locke is supposed to be a straight up trickster hero. Like Robin Hood, or the characters of the show "Leverage". He's not just a crook, he's also a priest and he really does believe in his duty to the dead and that holy mission for class revenge that Father Chains put them all on. (Even if this was retconned into this book and not in the first.) If anything he gets ever kinder from book to book. I think the third one literally points out that Camorr culture is particularly brutal, macho and homophobic compared to all the other city states, and much of Locke's initial darkness is part of his culture (like for example an extreme belief in having to take personal, blood-feud style vengeance) and that this is supposed to be a character flaw. But as he spends time in other cultures, he grows out of some of it. For example, in the first book, he calls the villain homophobic slurs several times. After encountering the queer-positive pirates in the second novel and that little discussion with "I'll try anything once - or 5 or 6 times" guy, he never does that again. And by book 3, when encountering a random pair of gay lovers making out in a garden and being tempted to go through their discarded clothing for their wallets, he stops his kleptomaniac impulse by reminding himself that doing malice to happy lovers would be bad karma.

Also, the losses of his friends, the brush with alcoholism and several with death have seemed to have made him a lot more sympathetic with other people's failings and tragedies. I actually really liked this character development. Yeah, he starts out as a bit of a cock-sure, obnoxious ass, but he does grow up and mellow out over the years, as one should expect.

Heh, but one character actually goes into a rant in the 3rd book about how Father Chains ruined them all for life as hardened, greed-motivated criminals by saddling them with a conscience. So I guess Lynch sees your problem.

By the way, can you really call a character a Mary Sue if literally none of his grand plans for cons ever work out, sometimes because of his own sheer stupidity (e.g. forgetting the cats), sometimes because his mark is just plain cleverer than him (e.g. the paintings), and the author takes an almost perverse delight in beating the crap out of him on a regular basis?

And, as in Lies, the mysterious Sabetha, the apparent love of Locke's life, is alluded to but remains absent: for fuck's sake, Lynch, stop it. You know she's just going to be a total let down after a build up like this.

I thought so, too, and got annoyed at the on-the-pedestal-putting. But now that I've read book 3, which features Sabetha both at about age 30 and when they were both teenagers: She's not. She's really, truly not. In fact, I was genuinely amazed at Sabetha - she's the best feminist (NOT straw-feminist!) character I've ever seen a male author write. And even if half of her discussions with Locke function mainly to introduce the male part of the audience to concepts like male entitlement to female sexuality, Nice Guy behaviour, Shroedinger's Rapist, victim blaming, the general frustration inherent in being an ambitious, highly talented woman in a patriarchal society and the frustration of being in love a with patriarchally socialised guy (who messes up occasionally even if he tries very, very hard not to, and who can't help the unfair male privilege that said society gives him), and that what feminists most want in a man is the ability to listen and learn - even if she's a bit of a mouthpiece in that regard: It's for a good and noble cause, and the author's heart is in the right place. And besides, there still is a clever, head-strong, angry, conflicted, and of course snarky character behind all the Issues. Her characterisation and reasons for leaving are thoroughly believeable, and also function as an Author's Saving Throw by actually pointing out in-text that the worldbuilding in the first book was problematic. Locke and Sabetha are still in love when they meet again, and they are surprisingly mature about their falling out and their attempts to fix it (if not in their professional rivalry...)

And Locke's adoring pedestal-putting, claiming her to be the love of his life, and his whole fixation on her are just that, quite literally - and the text seems aware that it is creepy, and the only thing that saves it is the fact that Locke is absolutely respectful of Sabetha's wishes and never, ever would force so much as a kiss on her. (I found the retconned-in reason for the fixation a bit sad, though: Until book 3, Locke could be read as demisexual for only ever being romantically/sexually attracted to one person. Then it's retconned as having creepy magical reasons that I don't want to spoil.)

The only thing about Sabetha I found a little... amusing, was that teenage Locke was almost too understanding and willing to accept anything feminism-related that she says and to change accordingly. Like I bet the author wishes he was at the age of 16, now that he finally gets it. Still, again, if it serves as a positive role model for male teenage readers, I'm fine with that kind of Mary-Sue-ism. Maybe it's a little preachy, especially since Lynch tries to cover so many topics, but I was just smiling through the whole thing. We do need more books like this.

The con plot of book 3 is a bit meh (basically it's a satire about 'democratic' elections, where Sabetha and Locke are press-ganged into controlling the campaign of one rivaling but politically indistinguishable party each, with all methods allowed short of murder, all ostensibly just for the entertainment of the people who really control the power in this 'republic' - their lives are being threatened to keep them in line, but it just doesn't have the personal stakes and sense of danger that the previous books had), and the teenage flashback is largely about the gang having to stage an annoyingly faux-Shakespearean play while conning a noble into paying for the production. So the relationship between Locke and Sabetha and the object lesson in how to make feminism 101 easily digestible in a fantasy novel, really are the main draws of the book. The meta plot for the series gets going right at the end, though. Which to me felt a bit like jumping the shark, but YMMV.

But I really do recommend the 3rd book, even if the plot is a little weak. Just for the sheer surrealness of reading a male author who manages to get practically everything right with regards to feminism. I mean, I've just read Elizabeth Bear's "Carnival" thinking she must have been the one to teach Lynch - but even she had like two dozen points in that ecofeminist polemic that made me headdesk.

(That book also needs a Ferret review, by the way. It's not thoroughly bad, as such, but the social philosophising made me uncomfortable and I wasn't always sure if I was supposed to be, and the worldbuilding has huge holes at least from my biologist/ecologist point of view. Still, queer protagonists are rare and deserve a mention.)

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Robinson L

at 20:15 on 2016-12-21

Cheriola: You know, oddly most of the things you mention didn't bother me at all. Except the utter pointlessness of the opening cliffhanger.

That pretty much sums up my feelings about the book, too. I guess I just think of this series as running on Rule of Cool and nothing else. Locke and Jean become pirates? Sure, why not? Doesn’t make sense? Who cares? And of course they’re going to complain about how ridiculous the Archon’s plan for them is, but that’s part of the fun.

Dialogue’s all the same? Ehn, so what? It’s all fun. And like you, I relish the modern snappiness/obscenity.

I mean, I don’t blame Wardog or Empink or anyone else who is bothered by this stuff, but just for myself, it seemed fine.

Wardog: I genuinely dig the exuberance and the irreverence.

That’s me, all the way (well, more like ~90% …)

I think the series is of two minds about whether Locke is actually supposed to be kind of an awful person or a stand up guy who happens to be a criminal—but as explained in my comment to the

Lies

review, I’ve chosen not to engage with those aspects and treat the whole thing as a rollicking adventure yarn. I will, however, once again point out a couple instances from this book of Character We’re Supposed to Root For Acts Like a Shitheel and Is In No Way Critiqued For It By the Text presently.

Re: description

And sadly the delicacy of touch seems to have been replaced by the typical fantasy fiction obsession with geographic detail.

Okay, here we come to a criticism I wholeheartedly agree with. Ye GODS but the description got tedious at times. It got tedious on

audiobook

; I shudder to think of trying to slog through it in text format.

I didn’t so much resent the book ending on a cliffhanger – although by the time I got to it, <Republic of Thieveslt/i> was already out, so I knew I’d be reading the next installment in a few months. Mostly, though, I was just relieved the cliffhanger revolved around Locke’s survival rather than Jean’s, because there’s a chance, however slight, of the series killing off Locke’s sidekick before the final book, whereas there’s absolutely none with Locke. So I appreciate the book making it absolutely clear that it’s not really a question of

if

the poisoned character will survive, but

how

.

His [Jean’s] short-lived relationship - although actually moderately engaging, while it lasts - is only further evidence of this. You can see its inevitably tragic conclusion approaching on the horizon like the sails of the good ship Obvious.

I think you undersell the extent to which the tragic conclusion was telegraphed beforehand. We’re talking

a MegaBrooks at the very least

. And I don’t think it would be humanly possible for the way it played out to have been any more cliché. Not to mention the whole fridging angle. Easily the lowest point of the series so far for me.

I thought RSURS handled the aftermath of said inevitable tragic conclusion a heck of a lot less annoyingly than most other books with similar big deaths I’ve encountered, though (lookin’ at you,

Harry Potter

). Jean is, of course, grief-stricken, and the book portrays the depth of his unhappiness while mostly avoiding an Epic Angst Sequence (seriously, there are few things in fiction less engaging than characters sitting around moping), and even sets up some genuinely touching moments, such as in the immediate aftermath of Ezri’s death, when Locke talks Jean down by threatening to throw himself at Jean, forcing the latter to beat the crap out of him (Locke), “and then you’ll feel terrible.”

Yes, pretending Jean is anything more than Locke’s sidekick is on par with “suddenly, Harry realized Dumbledore had actually been a fully-fleshed, three-dimensional character the entire time.” (Book 3 confirms this, when, after Locke is all patched up, Jean slips happily back into his role as Locke’s Number 2 without a hint of lingering grief over Ezri’s death, even as he’s helping out his best buddy romance Sabetha.) However, I thought the conflict between Locke and Jean set off by this outburst of Jean’s you quote in the article was actually pretty decent in terms of a “tensions between the series’ Main Pairing” subplot, which are usually of the eye-bleedingly terrible variety.

And what’s this guff about “moderately engaging?” I found it one of the two most engrossing parts of the story, along with some of Locke and Jean’s interactions. Jean and Ezri are adorable in every single scene they’re together: they bond over martial arts (with Jean being impressed that tiny Ezri actually managed to take him down at first), and their mutual affection for the Gentleman Bastardverse’s Shakespeare analogue. And then there’s the celebration scene where the two of them officially get together, soon after Jean has had his argument with Locke. And he’s keeping his distance from Ezri and it seems like at first he’s heeding Locke’s “you need to stay away from her, bro” bullshit, but it turns out, no, he’s craning away because he’s near-blind and he’s trying to see her properly and it’s incredibly cute you guys, like seriously.

Another thing I really like about the Jean / Ezri relationship is that the presentation feels balanced. I instantly get why Ezri is attracted to Jean as much as why Jean is attracted to Ezri, and in that scene during the celebration where, of course, Jean is being all shy and awkward, there’s a part where we suddenly see Ezri being shy and awkward as well. I’ve read a lot of similar romance arcs—especially those told from the male perspective—where the viewpoint character is vulnerable and complex while their love interest is all strong and confident and basically put on a pedestal.

I actually found it more engaging than Locke’s relationship with Sabetha in

Republic of Thieves

. While I agree with Cheriola that Sabetha is a great character, we don’t get much sense of her interior life, and the only times she displays vulnerability are when it directly relates to Locke. Also, it takes a long time into the story for her to tell Locke and the reader why she’s attracted to him, and I don’t feel the text really

shows

her being attracted the way RSRUS does with Ezri.

RSURS opens with Locke and Jean caught at crossbow-point on the docks and then, gasp, ever-faithful Jean turns on Locke. The novel then spools backwards in time to show you how they got themselves into this mess and, yes, it's arresting except that it's basically just like Alias, a cliff-hanger critical on the surface but ultimately completely meaningless and wrapped up quicker than a streaker at a tennis match.

Oh my god, that was the worst; maybe even worse than Ezri’s death.

I detest flash-forward openings as a general rule. I feel like there

may

have been one or two I’ve encountered which actually worked okay, but if so I can’t remember them now. Those possible examples aside, at best, flash-forward openings contribute f***-all of substance to the story, and at worst they undermine immersion by distracting the reader from the current action with questions which aren’t going to be answered for another 200-400 pages.

To be fair, some flash-forward openings, while still crap, sometimes do something clever with the reader’s expectations (I remember one where a guy wakes up and wonders what the heck is going on, and when we get to that part of the book in turns out the original guy died, and this is a clone, so that waking up sequence is technically his birth). RSURS is not one of those stories, though. The sequence takes on no new significance or added meaning for having read the rest of the book up to that point.

But wait, it gets

better

! Jean turning on Locke is in itself not terribly surprising: they are master con artists, after all. The linchpin (no pun intended) of the tension to this scene is that Jean fails to give the hand signals which mean “this is a scam, play along,” leaving Locke, and the readers, to wonder if this is a real betrayal, after all. Then, after Jean has dispatched the two assassins he says: “Oh, yeah, didn’t you see me giving the hand signal which means ‘this is a scam, play along’?” and Locke is all like, “Gosh, man, I must’ve missed it.” And that’s an end to it. Are you f**king kidding me?

Granted, this sort of stuff happens all the time in real life, but narratively speaking, it’s the worst kind of cheap trick for creating false tension. It

might

have been forgivable if there were some long-term consequences to the whole business. Locke and Jean have both been dosed with a slow-acting poison at this point in the story, and I thought maybe Locke’s failure to notice the hand signal was an early warning sign that the poison is beginning to effect his perception. But

no

. Or maybe Jean really was considering turning on Locke for some reason or other and then had a change of heart, and made up the part about the hand signal. No sign of that, either.

Look, I’m glad Jean doesn’t actually betray Locke, because as story turns go, that would have been at least as irritating as Ezri’s death, probably worse. But first you hit me with this bullshit flash-forward, then you double down on the bullshit by revealing the whole thing was just a trifling misunderstanding with no effing consequences whatsoever? What a waste of time.

… So yeah, on balance, I was not well pleased or amused by this sequence, especially as our hook into the main story.

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Robinson L

at 20:30 on 2016-12-21And now it’s time for another installment of Robinson Dissects the Ethics of the

Gentleman Bastard

Books. This week’s episode: Captain Zamira Drakasha Edition.

So yeah, Zamira is all kinds of awesome, but like with the other main characters, it’s best to turn one’s critical thinking off when thinking about her actions, or it becomes very hard to think of her as any kind of hero.

Case in point: she takes Locke, Jean, and the rest of their sorry crew onto her ship as probationary pirates. You do good, you play by the rules, you become full crew members; you step out of line, you die. All pretty standard stuff, except it turns out when she says she will kill you for breaking the rules, she means it.

One of the guys who originally signed on with Locke and Jean now despises the two of them intensely and is kind of an asshole in general, so the reader is primed to dislike him. He’s getting picked on by some of Zamira’s crew members, and finally he gets pushed too far and grabs a weapon to defend himself with. But laying hands on a weapon is against Zamira’s rules, so she has him executed on the spot. For the kind of mistake that anybody could make. And the reader is supposed to be okay with this because the guy was made to be unlikable. It could just as easily have been someone like Jean or Locke making a similar mistake, prompting Zamira to execute them, and the reader to hate her, in turn. We’re not invited to judge her character based on her actions, but on how we feel about the characters she acts against.

Later, there’s the time when we first see Zamira’s

Poison Orchid

attack a merchant ship, which involves pretending to be in peril themselves. As the pirates are preparing to board the ship, one of Zamira’s lieutenants tells the new recruits “if any of you are feeling moral qualms about attacking these merchants, just remember that they thought we were in distress, and only came to help us when we signaled we were willing to give them unconditional salvage rights.” Which, if you stop to think about it, is a

really

clever rationalization to psych people up to potentially commit an atrocity. I mean, if that were the point of the sequence—which it isn’t—I would’ve said it was brilliant. For all they know, the captain of the merchant ship was just a huge asshole, and literally everyone else aboard was clamoring to help the

Poison Orchid

right from the beginning.

It also seemed like, in the three way struggle between the Archon, Stragos; the proprietor of the big gambling den, Requin; and the members of the Priori; Stragos winds up being the Designated Villain of the book, not because his actions are worse than those of Requin or the Priori (we’ve already established they can be equally vicious), but because it happens to be Stragos’ actions which got Jean’s girlfriend killed. He gets punished, whereas Requin and the Priori members get happy endings, only because Stragos hurt someone the reader is supposed to care about.

Locke and Jean are quick to forgive the Priori member who was sending assassins after them because the Bondsmages told him the two Gentleman Bastards were going to cause him trouble. Which, okay, the assassins all failed, and all got killed, but by the logic of this story they were probably all Bad Men who deserved what they got, so no harm, no foul, right? Except, no, there

was

harm. One of the attempts to kill Locke and Jean was a really convoluted scheme to give them free drinks which were laced with poison. And the thing about convoluted schemes is that they’re full of holes, as in this one where Locke and Jean weren’t interested in the drink in question, and passed theirs on to the dockworker at the next table, who proceeded to die in their stead. No one in the story ever gets any kind of comeuppance for this murder, ‘cause I guess we’re not supposed to care about red shirts.

So basically, what I’m trying to say here is that the ethics of this series are all kinds of messed up if you look closely.

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Robinson L

at 00:00 on 2016-12-22

Cheriola: book 3, when encountering a random pair of gay lovers making out in a garden and being tempted to go through their discarded clothing for their wallets, he stops his kleptomaniac impulse by reminding himself that doing malice to happy lovers would be bad karma.

That was cute. Another very minor point I appreciated from that book was in a scene where Locke has to hold Sabetha as part of this play they’re performing and the narrator (speaking broadly from Locke’s perspective) talks about what it’s like for someone to hold another person whom they’re attracted to. It would have been

so

easy to gender the subject of attraction in that sentence as female, or to say something like “a person of the opposite sex whom they’re attracted to.” But no, it’s a general statement, and so the book sticks with generalities, not making stereotypes about the genders or orientations involved. Again, a minor point, but one I’ve seen even a lot of nominally well-intentioned works fail at, so I was mildly impressed.

I was genuinely amazed at Sabetha - she's the best feminist (NOT straw-feminist!) character I've ever seen a male author write.

I think it was this part which finally clinched it for me to read the series. As a male author myself, I can’t help but take it as a challenge.

As mentioned earlier, though, I feel like we didn’t get much sense of Sabetha’s internal life, except as it relates to Locke, and she has to tell Locke (and the reader) what particularly attracts her to Locke, rather than the book showing us.

It probably was implausible to have 16-year-old Locke be so receptive to Sabetha’s Feminism 101 lectures, but for me it was preferable to the second hand embarrassment of having Locke throw out insipid, MRA-apologist arguments for Sabetha to shoot down.

Since I’m not seeing a

Republic of Thieves

review on the horizon, I suppose I might as well give my thoughts on the book in general. Overall, I liked it, and Sabetha is a fine addition to the series’ cast.

I also kind of dug the way the main caper of the book was not a high stakes life or death game of taking on some brutal, affluent, entitled snot or other, but rather fixing an upcoming election. It shows you can have all the same drama and intrigue without putting countless lives on the line, which comes as a nice change of pace. (Granted, it turns out there are countless lives on the line in the Bondsmagi’s larger game, but that only comes up after the whole thing is over, so in my view it still counts.)

My political sensibilities being what they are, I particularly liked the election angle to the plot because the book depicts it as 1) an aristocratic exercise with no pretense of populist input (only a small fraction of the city’s residents have the franchise), and 2) a complete farce in any case, because who gets elected has f**k all to do with who’s better leadership material or has the best policies – the book dispenses with such preposterous fig leaves and dives straight into the real heart of electoral politics: naked corruption, double dealing, and general chicanery. There’s also the implication that who gets elected is ultimately trivial in terms of how Karthain is actually run, because the real ruling elite (in this case, the Bondsmagi), make damn sure that in practice, it gets run exactly the way they believe produces the greatest benefit for the city’s inhabitants. (The book seems to suggest that what they think is best for Karthain really is, which is where its views and mine diverge, but other than that, I’m completely on board with the book’s representation.)

Look, there's no way of saying this gently, but Twilight (the movie) is awful. It's just awful. It's so badly paced, it's actually boring a lot of the time. And when you stop and think about it for half a second you realise that it's stupid and, potentially, offensive as well. But that's Meyer's fault, not the film's. But, still, like the book to which it is almost co-dependently true, there's something about it that makes it ... addictive, in the most tepid, bloodless way possible. Like ready salted hula hoops.

But what the Twilight movie does exceptionally well is capture the atmosphere and preoccupations of the book. The lingeringly dreary tale of Bella Swan falling for Edward Cullen, the biggest vampiric pussy ever to grace the pages of romantic fiction, is re-created with all the intensity of the original, and told without a glimmer of humour or self-irony. Which, remarkably, works in its favour - since a sense of self-irony is something that develops after being a teenager has already fucked you up beyond redemption.

So in terms of fidelity to the original, it is, at least, well done. The Cullen clan are all spot on, especially Alice (although Jasper looks lobotomised a lot of the time). And the guy playing Jacob - who I always preferred to Edward although I understand Meyer psychos him up in later books - is, true to form, hotter than Edward, much as I love Robert Pattinson. The two leads have impossible tasks but somehow they manage to imbue their lingering looks and clunky dialogue with some sense of conviction - I thought they were both nuts but I believed in their nuttitude.

But let's face it here, there's no way this review can ever be fair (or even a review) because Twilight isn't aimed at me. Far more interesting than the film, to be honest, were the reactions of the audience. It was comprised mainly of teenage girls, who shrieked, sighed and swooned their way through it, and their long-suffering kid brothers who couldn't contain their utter contempt for everything that transpired, occasionally bursting into uncomprehending, hysterical laughter or expostulating "dude! This sucks!" in tones of utter despair. As I left I ducked into the lady's toilets and was thus subjected to a barrage of high-pitched enthusiasm about the gorgeous Edward Cullen and the romance of it all. Waiting outside, my companion in being grown up enough not to get it, overheard two boys as they left:

First boy: That was the worse film, ever!

Second boy: That's the last we ever see a chick flick.

Oh bless. But then Twilight wasn't for them either.

I reason I quite enjoyed Twilight when I read it was because I gave it too much credit and thought it was an allegory. I've always really like paranormal teenage stuff. It makes perfect sense to me. I mean when you're between the ages of 13 and, well, 27, attractive members of the opposite sex do seem like these impossible, unknowable, unattainable creatures so they might as well be vampires or werewolves or vampirates (okay, maybe not vampirates). And since a large part of growing up is getting to grips with a world both hostile and full of secrets people won't tell you, again, it makes perfect sense for those secrets to be "there are vampires in it". And since you're undergoing a horrific process of unstoppable uncontrollable change that you both want and don't want, why shouldn't it be represented by discovering that you're also the High Queen of Faerie, or a Vampire Slayer, or whatever? And, finally, of course there's the problem of sex - its dangers and attractions are beautifully encapsulated by the dangers and attractions of supernatural power, manifest either in others of yourself. That it articulated these ideas so clearly, so cleverly and so wittily is one of the (many) strengths of early season Buffy.

Unlike Buffy, Twilight is not knowing. But it is terribly terribly serious and that's why it works. Teen crushes and love affairs (to be honest, crushes and love affairs in general) are rarely humorous to those involved: unrequited love is the most painful of adolescent experiences and your first taste of romance the most intoxicating. And although when you look at Edward Cullen with the eyes of an adult you see an obsessive, domineering, disempowering, semi-misogynistic nutjob, when you look at him with the eyes of a teenager, he's utterly, profoundly desirable. His whole world is Bella - because he never sleeps, he can literally spend every hour of every day either with her, watching her or thinking about her. He has no life and no interests outside her - for the rest of us that alone cries out "restraining order", for a teenager (to make this less patronising, I'll say, for my teenage self) the idea of someone being completely bound up in you is breathtakingly romantic. As a teenager, you are still semi-dependent upon various authority figures (school, parents, etc. etc.) and very probably highly uncertain in yourself - thus the idea of another person needing you for anything cannot fail to be appealing. Again, I'm making a lot of generalisations about The Way Teenage Girls Feel here, but I associate my own teenage years with confusion, helplessness and a fair quantity of misery. Quite frankly, I wanted an Edward Cullen - because I thought that through the value given to me by another I could learn to value myself. Feeling incomplete, because, quite frankly, I was, I was searching for romance to "complete" me. That real loves exists only between two fully self-actualised, functional and capable human beings is something one learns only in later life.

What I'm trying to say here is this: it's theoretically okay to like Twilight. I even believe it performs a useful function: rarely are these private ideas and desires as well-realised as they are in Twilight. It's nice to have someone stand up and say "yeah, sometimes girls want this"; unfortunately, where it becomes problematic is that it never acknowledges its own status as fantasy and it never grows up. Now, I read a lot of a romance so I'm quite happy with fantasies progressing down whatever path they happen to progress - the alpha male may not appeal to me personally but I'm capable of recognising that it's perfectly acceptable to fantasise about having a domineering man with storm grey eyes who is secretly in love with you but doesn't know how to express it fling you down across the bed and have awesome sex with you until you get to like it. Women are very capable of recognising that when they want flinging it's on their own terms and that a man who behaves like an attractive asshole in a book may not be so attractive in real life. I like romance because it's such a grown up genre: it's a safe space where we get to shrug and let ourselves get swept away in what could be a rather politically incorrect fantasy and nobody accuses you of being too dumb to be able to tell the difference.

Because, as I have said, that Twilight isn't knowing, its status as a fantasy becomes problematised. Basically there's no acknowledgement that it is one; there are elements of the fantastic, gorgeous vampire falls for everygirl etc, of course, but the book never invites us to question their relationship. And, really, given its nature, we should. I could easily list the ways in which Edward and Bella's relationship is fucked to high heaven but since we're all intelligent readers I won't bother. I suppose the quintessential example, however, would be Edward's refusal to turn Bella into a vampire. This is never really open for discussion, one gets the feeling Edward has made his decision and that's that. You'd think that, as an equal participant in a relationship between two people, Bella's opinions should be at least relevant and that their final decision on the matter should be one they have reached jointly. That's what happens in functional relationships. But Edward is not to be persuaded: thus it is very much his decisions, not their decision. He thinks he's protecting her but his behaviour implies that he does not trust her to know what she wants and, in this, as on many other occasions, his protective streak is actually revealed to be rooted in fundamental disrespect for Bella's ability to live her life and make decisions.

Interestingly, despite the chorus of sighing from the teenage audience, I was impressed by Robert Pattinson's portrayal of Edward Cullen. I found him genuinely a bit creepy. He's so obviously ill-at-ease with who and what he is (unlike the rest of the Cullen clan who seem perfectly content to be vampires) and his self-loathing is both evident and off-putting. I think the other girls were titillated by the air of danger and emo but, actually, it's hard to love a man who hates himself. With a weirdly twisted smile, Edward characterises their relationship: "a stupid lamb and a sick, masochistic lion" - the point that Pattinson (bless him) seems to be trying to convey is that he genuinely means it. He thinks Bella is stupid for loving him and, quite frankly, she is (never trust a man who wants to eat you, girls); and he hates himself to such a degree that he cannot respect anyone who purports to love him. This is, of course, precisely what Pattinson has said in interviews - and I'd like to send him about two tonnes of love for actually managing to bring it out of the text since, you can see from reading about half of page of the book, it is something one reads into it, rather than something that is meant to be read.

Edward's love for Bella is truly masochistic at heart - since he must exert constant control to avoid eating her, he never allows himself to forget his own predatory nature, the very nature he despises. I think, through his protection of her, he is attempting to protect the part of himself he conceives as lost - his innocence, his mortality, whatever you want to call it. Regardless, it's messed up and in no way a grounding for a healthy relationship, even, or perhaps especially, with a 17 year old girl. Combine this tortured emotional masochism with an equally tortured attitude to sexuality and things really get nasty. Given Meyer's background, it's not surprising that Twilight, despite the gushyness of its romance, is essentially sexless but the intermingling of Edward's bloodlust and, err, lust-lust, however, serves to present sex as something dangerous and potentially fatal. Noticeably Bella spends most of Edward's kisses (and also her wedding night) unconscious. By this stage we have left the realm of fantasy far behind and moved full time into "just plain wrong".

Now I'm not going to get onto a soapbox and start sputtering that this not appropriate reading material for our children. The first book at least functions as a fantasy and as an honest expression of not-entirely-healthy teenage desires. And, although if you pay even the slightest bit of attention, you can see some very disturbing undercurrents, it was clear from the giggly enthusiasm in the cinema nobody gave a damn. We went there to see Robert Pattinson looking intense and beautiful with his insane bedhair, his silly sparkling skin and his dodgy crimsoned lips. That's what we were looking for, and that's what we got. And, for the moment, that's okay.

Some Rockin' Twilight Links

Oh God, no

Growing Up Cullen

Cleoland's Discussion of Twilight

, including her recaps of Midnight Sun

My second favourite Robert Pattinson interview

My top favourite Robert Pattinson interview

Themes:

Books

,

TV & Movies

,

Sci-fi / Fantasy

~

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Gina Dhawa

at 00:28 on 2009-01-03Whilst I'm not sure I can actually bear to fork out as much money as my local cinemas is asking for in order to see

Twilight

, I am actually intrigued by the movie because of what Robert Pattinson has been saying about how he's approached Edward. If he's managed to bring any hint of that about at all, it's no bad thing.

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Wardog

at 19:44 on 2009-01-03Basically it's not a good film - so it's hard to recommend it. It's very true to the book so if you hate the book, you'll hate the film. On the other hand, Robert Pattinson is obviously the best thing about it. He's fabulous to look at (although the film does its utmost to make him look *stupid*) and his interpretation of the character really comes through the performance. Which is a pretty impressive feat, when you think about it.

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Nathalie H

at 21:03 on 2009-01-03"It's nice to have someone stand up and say "yeah, sometimes girls want this"; unfortunately, where it becomes problematic is that it never acknowledges its own status as fantasy and it never grows up."

I think here you've really hit the nail on the head and said everything about my problem with Twilight.

I hated the book because it was astonishingly badly written; and I haven't seen the film, but I think I'll like it more because I am a step further away from the astonishingly bad writing, and only have to deal with astonishingly bad dialogue. ;) Oh and pacing and all that. But yes, props to Pattinson here.

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Wardog

at 00:14 on 2009-01-04The style of the book didn't bother me too much - I think I rated it as clunky/pedestrian rather than actually terrible but I was really looking at it with a proper critical eye.

The dialogue is - as you would expect - rather cringe-inducing. The ludicrousness of it seems more marked when spoken, than when read:

Edward: I've never wanted a human's blood so much.

Bella: I trust you.

Me: Wrong answer.

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http://serenoli.livejournal.com/

at 12:59 on 2009-01-10The point where I wanted to give it up was when Isabella Whats-her-name got annoyed with people for not knowing her nickname was 'Bella' not 'Isabella'. The book is annoying enough in its portrayal of the obsessive/dependent relationship they have, but Isabella is just such a self-absorbed twit that I kept wanting awful things to happen to her, and getting angry with Edward for saving her in the nick of time.

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Wardog

at 00:51 on 2009-01-11Hello and thank you for the comment. Yes, I entirely agree - Bella is infuriating. I found Kristen Stewart moderately sympathetic, insofar as I thought the actress was doing a tolerable job with an awful part (and I thought the relationship between Bella and her Dad was one of bearable aspects of the film), but the character is beyond redemption. I think she's basically a placeholder ... a big walking sign with "insert yourself here" written on it; unfortunately the fact she has no personality to speak of just makes her actions/reactions both irritating and incomprehensible.

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Jamie Johnston

at 02:22 on 2009-04-19Hurrah, I've finally got back to reading FerretBrain! And to prove it, I'm going to comment on this review of a film I haven't seen, just like I used to.

So no, I haven't seen the film and have not the slightest inclination to do so, especially having read this, but I have read the first three books, and I like them, and two remarks spring to mind as I ask myself why their uncritically positive depiction of an unhealthy teenage relationship doesn't bother me. The first is that I'm not sure that it's uncritically positive, and the second is that I'm not sure that it bothers me that it's uncritically positive. (Yes, these remarks are mutually contradictory, but never mind.)

Being unfashionably opposed to spoilers, I warn readers that as I unpack those two remarks I'll be mentioning elements of the plot of the first three books. (Likewise, if anyone replies, please warn me if you're going to mention any plot from 'Breaking Dawn' so I can close my eyes!)

So yes, having recently finished reading 'Eclipse' I don't feel that, at this stage of the series, I'm being asked to whole-heartedly approve of Edward and Bella's relationship. I think it's fair to say that by the end of 'Eclipse' we've seen, quite comprehensively dramatized, the tendency of the relationship to cause emotional and physical harm to people who don't deserve it, and that Bella and Edward have each engaged in some - perhaps tediously much - self-criticism on that point. They've even to some extent acknowledged that there is such a thing as a normal, emotionally balanced, non-obsessive relationship that can be had, one that would not be a pale imitation of 'true love' but a genuinely loving long-term relationship such as people should count themselves lucky to find, and that theirs is not it. Of course they cling to the belief that theirs is equally valid, or perhaps more so, but surely to ask anything else of these characters would be to ask the writer to be morally responsible at the expense of emotional truth. People in an unhealthy relationship do, at some level, believe that love redeems, trumps, justifies, cancels out the unhealthiness, otherwise they'd address the unhealthiness or get out of the relationship. So naturally Edward and Bella don't see their relationship as a Bad Idea, but what about the reader?

I won't deny that Meyer puts the reader in a sort of default position of assuming that the relationship is a Good Thing and the couple should stay together. But I'd have thought that was the inevitable and proper consequence of making Bella the point-of-view character. We identify with her and therefore we shrink from the emotional pain that would come from breaking them up, even if we feel it would be better in the long run. We also, through her eyes, feel strongly positive about Edward and therefore don't want to put him through the wringer either, and we have to admit that frankly he is probably the one character who genuinely would be worse off if they broke up. That's not because Bella is all that, but because he seems to have no better options and because he, unlike everyone else including her, doesn't obviously suffer any real ill effects from the relationship (apart from the fact that it perpetuates his unhealthy view of relationships in general, but that's not a problem since he's not remotely interested in having any other relationships ever).

Oh, and a quick digression here in response to the comment that "the intermingling of Edward's bloodlust and, err, lust-lust, however, serves to present sex as something dangerous and potentially fatal". Yes that's true, and yes it's a rather unhelpful way to encourage teenage girls to think about sex. But at the same time - and I admit that here I venture into dangerous territory for someone who's never been a teenage girl - is it encouraging teenage girls to feel that way, or is it merely providing a rather apposite metaphor for the way many American small-town teenage girls probably *do* feel about sex? Let's face it, there are umpteen things in modern western (and particularly unreconstructed American) culture that conspire to make sex seem to them both dangerous and desirable, fearful and forbidden and, yes, even potentially fatal but at the same time the proper and expected fulfillment of female life? Aren't they told that they mustn't but also that they inevitably must, and am I wrong to suppose that quite a few of Meyer's readers will find (or will already have found) themselves in clinches where, like Bella, they want to go further than they 'know' (as it were) it is 'safe' to? I agree that Meyer's metaphor to some extent reinforces that unhealthy fear of sex by having sex as a literally life-threatening process for her heroine. But at the same time it goes some way to redeeming itself by at least reversing the traditional 'girl resists, boy insists' caricature of sexual initiation (on which, of course, traditional 'male vampire bites screaming female virgin' stories depend) - she at least is not saying to her young female readers that they shouldn't feel sexual attraction to their boyfriends, and she does a fairly decent job of sharing the responsibility for avoiding the 'dangers' of sex between the boy and the girl (the message being that the girl is entitled to expect the boy to restrain himself, but she should also be aware that what she's doing can make that easier or harder for him, which is perhaps not the most role-busting message ever but is better than many). And, as things stand at the end of 'Eclipse', the message seems to be developing from 'sex is dangerous' to the more balanced 'sex can be dangerous but that needn't stop you doing it with the proper precautions' (though it remains to be seen quite what the precautions are in the case of Edward and Bella); and although it would be nice to live in a social and medical world that justified a rather more positive and cheerful message, I'd say that's a reasonably constructive message considering the world we (and, again, small-town American girls in particular) do live in.

So, returning from that digression, I'd say it's no surprise and no serious moral or literary failing that the most frequent and obvious signposts in these books point to 'Bella Edward 4 Eva' land. Still, as I've said (and as you've said too, Kyra), there are plenty of fairly visible signposts to 'This Relationship Is Going To Hurt Everyone Around It', and at least a few to 'Just Plain Wrong'. The question for the reader in the end is whether 'but they love each other' is an adequate answer. Isn't that the case with 'Romeo and Juliet' similarly? Don't get me wrong, I don't compare the two works for quality, and I don't suggest the central relationship of Shakespeare's play is quite as messed up as that of the 'Twilight' series. But they both depict intense teenage romances that are almost certainly, when looked at from a sober adult point of view, Bad Ideas, and that can only be seen as positive if one accepts the leading couple's belief that the intensity of their love is sufficient to overcome all objections and excuse all damage caused to themselves and others. And although in both cases there are plenty of clues leading to the sensible conclusion that it isn't, there's also sufficient force in the lovers' own view, and sufficient attention given to that point of view, that significant parts of the audience (whether teenage girls in cinemas or eighteenth century Romantics in theatres) can end up approving of the Bad Idea.

The big objection to what I've just said, I suppose, is that 'Romeo and Juliet' isn't *specifically marketed at teenage girls*. That's a fair point. But, well, I don't know, somehow that doesn't quite convince me. Partly that's perhaps just because I don't want to blame Meyer for the way her books are marketed; and even if she consciously wrote them for that audience, I'm still not entirely comfortable with the idea of not trusting young people to cope with it. I remember hearing Richard Eyre on the radio talking about his production of 'King Lear' and saying that when he was in his 30s he thought 'how could Lear treat his children like that?' and when he was in his 50s he thought 'how could Lear's children treat him like that?' Teenagers are going to read a story of teenage romance differently from us sensible jaded sort-of-grown-ups, but does that mean writers should over-compensate by steering them strongly to see things the way they 'should' see them, i.e. the way we see them? Or should we let them believe that 'Twilight' and 'Romeo and Juliet' are about all-conquering all-redeeming love and trust that the more-or-less subtle indications to the contrary will lodge somewhere in their unconscious minds and give them a richer view of the texts as their view of life becomes more complex over the years?

Of course this all partly depends how the series turns out in the end. If it ends, as it may well do, with everything hunky-dory for everyone, then my argument here will be a lot weaker than it seems to me now at the end of 'Eclipse'. But at the moment I think the most important thing for books like this is to be emotionally honest and truthful, and I think the series so far, and perhaps 'Eclipse' in particular, have enough of that for me to feel fairly comfortable about the more troubling side.

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http://viorica8957.livejournal.com/

at 05:04 on 2009-04-19tl;dr

Seriously though,I think that Meyer's comparisons of her work to other famous "love stories" and her belief that hers leaves them all in the dust, and the fact that she's openly stated that she would leave her husband for either of her male leads proves that she isn't just writing from a teenage POV; she's living through one.

(By the way, is anyone else having trouble logging in? Half the time it refuses to accept my password, and the other hald, it logs me in automatically.)

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Rami

at 11:10 on 2009-04-19@Viorica: I'd noticed you were commenting via OpenID lately. Could you drop me an email (

webmaster

at

ferretbrain.com

) with details? Let me know what browser you're using, etc?

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Dan H

at 11:38 on 2009-04-19Speaking as somebody who has *not only* not seen the film but *also* not read any of the books (but who *has* poked around fandom a fair bit) I'd echo Viorica's comments that Meyer's comments about the series undermine a lot of the saner, more sensible interpretations of it.

It's a classic Death of the Author problem - you can probably read Twilight as an interesting portrayal of a destructive relationship from the point of view of somebody currently caught up in it, but if you *know* - for a fact - that the author didn't intend it to be read that way it becomes a lot harder to see that interpretation.

You get a similar problem with good old HP. The early books are convincingly written from the point of view of a naive, slightly self-absorbed teenager. Later we discover that no, they were actually written by an omniscient narrator, and that Harry's warped perceptions of the world map 1-1 onto Wizarding reality.

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Shim

at 13:54 on 2009-04-19

(By the way, is anyone else having trouble logging in? Half the time it refuses to accept my password, and the other hald, it logs me in automatically.)

Not the same trouble, I reckon. But I always have to log in exactly twice.

(also, if using Firefox you have to quickly "allow" whatever the bar asks about before it disappears - once you've done it once it seems happy enough to work in future)

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Wardog

at 15:43 on 2009-04-22Welcome back to Ferretbrain, Jamie :) Yay. I'd be interested to know what you think of Twilight after Breaking Dawn...

I think both Dan and Viorica have in to some extent my concerns with your points. But essentially, to me, the Twilight series only feels emotionally honest as you claim if you're willing to problematise it on your own behalf. And although there are plenty of sensible people of all ages who read Twilight and end up asking the interesting, complicated questions you ask about it (is twue wuv really enough to justify all this), there are plenty of people who simply don't. I can't really quality this clearly to myself I think it comes down to a few interacting issues:

1) Surrounding cultural framework and the problem of authorial intent - basically I don't think you can discount this sort of thing when you're reading a text (although, of course, you shouldn't be constrained by it). And Stephanie Meyer is basically nuts. She is very obviously not only unaware of but wilfully blind to potential dysfunctionalities in her text. Furthermore, many of the things you draw attention to, for example the fact Edward and Bella angst all the time about their relationship and the fact it seriously damages anyone who comes near it, I believe are meant to *validate* the twueness of their wuv.

2) Moral responsibility - maybe this is going to make me look like some kind of fascist and I'll probably regret it but I believe that if you're writing for children and young adults you have a moral responsibility to your audience. All readers are, of course, to an extent vulnerable. And by a moral responsibility I mean you don't necessarily need to say morally righteous things, or even give a damn about morality, but I think fostering uncritically (and I know you dipsute this) the unhealthiest notions of love and romance is genuinely hugely problematic. I know this sounds like hypocrisy because I'm also going on about and about the fundamental human right of fantasy but, again, I think this is becomes very dangerous territory when it is not accompanied by awareness. Essentially Meyer does not seem to be saying "we all have fantasies about this kind of thing" or "isn't it intriguing the way romantic may not be the same as healthy" but "hey girls, I wish I had this, so it must be okay."

3) Connected to the above - I often find reading teenage romances interesting, mainly because when I started I had to make a psychological adjustment. Initially I was found I was grumbling away in my adult "you think this insipid guy with floppy hair is the love of your life but he's just some 16 year old" way and then I realised I was missing the point completely. Ultimately what I'm trying to say is that it's possible to being true to the way love and life feels when you're a teenager, right down to the unhealthy aspects of teenage love, without also being nuts about it.

Anyway, I'm going on and on and on. I do see your points, but I think you're being way to generous to Meyer who doesn't deserve it =P

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Arthur B

at 16:27 on 2009-04-22The first time I read Wikipedia's plot summary of

Breaking Dawn

I thought someone had vandalised the article. I was wrong. This series is its own parody.

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Jamie Johnston

at 22:28 on 2009-04-24

tl;dr

Story of my life. :)

Okay, I take your collective word for it that Meyer is nuts and creepy and probably shouldn't be allowed to write for children. It's a shame. She plots well. In fact one of the things I most enjoyed about the books was nothing to do with the teenage romance but the rather thrilling moment in the first book (

spoiler alert

) when it occurred to me that (1) there was a big vampire cross-country hunt possibly followed by an even bigger vampire battle going on somewhere, (2) I wasn't being given a description of it as I would have been in any fantasy / horror book not specifically aimed at teenage girls, and (3) I didn't feel I was missing anything at all. But that's by the by.

Basically I say this stuff not because I'm an 'authorial-intent-is-irrelevant' hard-liner but because I almost never read interviews with authors and generally haven't the foggiest idea what the author thinks. Partly because it's disappointing to discover that an author adheres to a less nuanced and sophisticated interpretation of his or her own work than I do. :)

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http://descrime.livejournal.com/

at 03:03 on 2009-04-25Okay, I went on YouTube and watched the first 6 parts of the movie.

I have to give her credit for one thing: Bella and Edward clearly deserve each other. They're both self-centered, anti-social, emo kids. In fact, I think Meyers/the screenwriter does a really great job of showing that Bella would never be happy except with Edward.

I mean, on her first day of school, six kids try to befriend her. We're shown that the adults in the town also go out of their way to acknowledge her. And yet, she spurns all offers from the other kids to come join them hanging out in the parking lot. She agrees to go with the other two girls to pick out prom dresses but then sits in the window and reads a book the whole time, clearly sending off signals that she's such a martyr for coming. She derides all the towns welcoming efforts to her mother. And she never freaking smiles. She's a permanent flatline. Might as well date the dead.

And oh god, the moment in the science lab when they meet for the first time. Their eyes meet and she steps in front of the fan so that her hair blows dramatically. It was hilarious. And you know Edward jerked like that because

he totally popped a boner

felt their mystical connection. The actor clearly went out of his way to show how awkward Edward is and how out-of-control of his own emotions and body. I appreciated that in a movie he could have just cruised through.

Since I don't care to track down the rest of the movie, do we ever learn why Bella has such special smelling blood or why Edward can't read her mind?

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Arthur B

at 03:31 on 2009-04-25

Since I don't care to track down the rest of the movie, do we ever learn why Bella has such special smelling blood or why Edward can't read her mind?

I believe the answers are a) she eats a lot of asparagus and b) she has no mind lol.

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http://poeticalengine.blogspot.com/

at 17:29 on 2009-04-25I admit that I've never read the books or seen the movie (I pretty much swore not to the minute I saw someone selling "Edward Body Glitter" on eBay). However my flatmate has been reading them and doing a fairly amusing read through on LJ. Between reading this article and watching her chuck the book at walls, I think it's safe to say I won't be reading it despite my curiousity. Or seeing the movie which is a shame, really, because Robert Pattinson really is very nice to look at.

Still, I'm a bit worried at how lack-of-self-awareness is becoming a prerequisite for writing a mega-successful book series these days. It's possibly just my cynicism showing through but between Meyer's "This is True Love! Really!" and JKR's plea for tolerance, my belief that canny self-reference can be found on the bookshelves of my local ASDA for less than a fiver may have been irrevocably shaken.

-Heather-Anne

So with the release of New Moon, and that fact that it has now beaten out the sales of, like, everything ever, I am reminded strongly of the intense rage I feel for anything Twilight-related. Add that to the rage-inspiring feminism kick I’ve been on lately, and it should come as no surprise that I’ve decided to have a go at Twilight. Because nothing inspires my rage-o-meter more than a woman writing a book damaging to women, especially teenage women.

I can only personally speak to the first book as that is the one I read. I decided to spare my sanity and keep the others far, far away from me lest my brain start melting out my ears. Let me give a brief disclaimer: I had negative feelings toward Twilight before I even read it, and I kind of only read it so I didn't feel hypocritical hating it so much. So, was my judgment colored? Yes, it was. But that doesn’t mean that my points aren’t valid and supported by the text.

Here's my issue with Twilight. I can accept Twilight as a guilty pleasure read. I understand why so many girls are titillated by the idea of it; every novel or TV series or movie that I’m exposed to, I, too, will inevitably fall for the vulnerable, sympathetic bad guy (Draco Malfoy, anyone?). What I object to is the people who are under the opinion that Twilight is a well-written, well-crafted, original book that realistically and believably captures a healthy and functional relationship between two people who truly love each other.

Not only is the book inherently flawed in its conception, but it isn’t even written well to make up for it. One of the biggest examples of writing-fail comes in the prologue of the book. Meyer wrote a prologue about an imminent death in first person past tense. Say that with me again. IMMINENT death. FIRST person. PAST tense. Immediately any sort of actual terror inspired by this passage is moot because it's pretty obvious that this imminent death is not happening. And it’s not even as if the prose itself manages to inspire some sense of fear or suspense. Bella tells us she’s “terrified”, but the writing here focuses on her thought process, which is quite lengthy and calm for someone who is about to die. I kind of imagine the killer looking at his watch and tapping his foot while he allows her to think all this out. Surely, the point of putting this scene at the beginning of the book is to create suspense, and it fails miserably in this.

So, as you can see, Twilight was off to a fabulous start with me. It was like going to a blind date you regretted agreeing to and seeing the complete antithesis of what is attractive and desirable to you. But I was willing to keep going and give the book a shot to impress and win me over. So I begrudgingly continued reading, and sadly it did not get any better. I will address the following things in this rant: Shiny Vampires, Bella-fail, and Abuse = Love.

Let's start right off with: Shiny Vampires

I have always liked the idea of vampires. Vampires in literature have predominately functioned as metaphors – most commonly as metaphors for sex and seduction. Dracula, arguably the most famous vampire novel, did exactly this. Dracula is about sexual repression. The vampires represent sex; the staking of Lucy in the graveyard is written very well to read disturbingly as a rape scene, and the three sisters, as well as Dracula himself, are seductive and deadly. And being turned into a vampire means to give in to your sexual desire. And let’s face it, with all the penetration (by teeth) and exchanging of bodily fluids (blood), it’s not hard to see what Stoker was going for.

All Twilight did was indulge an extremely common fantasy that has been done many times before, and honestly, it's a lot more acceptable when you don't try to defend the blood-sucking undead creature's really outrageously inappropriate behavior by equating it with love. Yes, it's fine to investigate the downside of immortality, to make your vampires angsty, but the problem I have with "Twipires" is that they really don't make any sense outside of "Vampires need to do this so my plot works." There are some lazy attempts to explain why vampires are acting so OOC or doing conveniently plot relevant things, but it comes off more as lazy writing than plausible excuse. For example, the reason they go to high school is because they need to start as young as possible in a new town so that people won’t notice right away that they’re not aging. I don’t know that being the odd home-schooled family would make them stand out any more than they already do, but if they didn’t go to high school, I guess there would be no book – you know, unless you came up with another plausible reason for two people to meet and interact.

And here’s where Edward doesn’t even try to provide any sort of reasonable explanation for the inconsistencies:

“Don’t laugh – but how can you come out during the daytime?” He laughed anyway. “Myth.” “Burned by the sun?” “Myth.” “Sleeping in coffins?” “Myth.”

That’s it, folks. That’s all we get. Not even an attempt at why these things have gotten misconstrued over the years. No line about that damn Bram Stoker getting all these ideas in people’s heads or anything. No attempt at all.

So, let's go over what goes into making a "Twipire". They drink blood, they don't age, they have super speed and strength, they can't die easily (in fact, even conventional methods like stakes and sun don't work), and, the biggie, they don't combust in the sun - they sparkle like a magical little pony. Oh, and let's not forget that some of them develop cool powers completely arbitrarily that are convenient to the plot and only serve to make her characters more “speshul” and nifty. There are certain changes I can accept in vampire mythology, such as it being a virus ala Blade or deciding that vampires can't actually do things like turn into bats and such. But when you take away the essential things that make a vampire a vampire (not being able to go out in the day, being killed by stakes), these creatures cease to be recognizable as vampires. By denying them the core elements of their identity, the vampires are domesticated in a way. Their power, both as characters and as literary devices, is taken away. It would be like if someone wrote about vampires and decided that instead of drinking blood, they had to stand upside down on their heads for at least five hours a day to keep living. And I highly doubt that vampires are the only monster in common mythology that lives on blood. Why not find a better creature to suit your needs instead of changing an already existing mythos almost completely?

I suppose my more basic issue with them is that I don't see much real downside to being a vampire in this world. They're super-strong, super-fast, get cool powers possibly, seem to be fairly uninhibited from going outside, and are immortal and nearly unkillable. Sounds pretty good to me. From what I could see, there was no good argument against turning Bella into a vampire pretty much immediately except, of course, that maybe you're too young at seventeen to know who you want to spend the rest of your life with, but this isn't a claim the book seems interested in exploring. As far as I remember, the problem Edward has with turning Bella into a vampire has everything to do with not wanting to make her into a monster like him and nothing to do with the fact that their love might not be forever. Instead, their everlasting love is presented as a given. Now, in Bella’s teenage mind, this is acceptable; it’s very common to think your high school boyfriend is “the one”. But no one in the text – or the text itself – seems to challenge this idea. To use another vampire/human relationship most of us are probably aware of, Angel – being older and having more life-experience – believes that Buffy has a teenage crush on him and will eventually mature out of the idea that having a vampire boyfriend is cool or at all emotionally satisfying. Twilight doesn’t tackle these more covert emotional complications of a vampire/human relationship; it is satisfied to merely deal with the obvious, which makes their relationship far less interesting to the reader.

Let's move on to Bella-fail...

So, anytime I say the words "Mary Sue" and the person I'm talking to goes "huh?", I simply say, "Like Bella." And they immediately understand. Okay, I do tend to give a sort of definition as well, but as soon as I mention Bella, I need say no more. Bella is the epitome of Mary Sue. She keeps insisting over and over how she isn't pretty or popular or special, but the text pretty much contradicts her at every turn. No one liked her at her old school, she wasn't popular, she's doesn't stand-out, and yet, in her first few days of school, she has three, count 'em, three guys all clamoring immediately for her attention (Eric, Mike, and Tyler – we’ll not even count Edward and Jacob yet). So, this girl who insists how absolutely plain she is is someone still capable of arresting the attention of, like, every guy in school. I call bullshit. Now, here’s a quote from Meyer giving an answer to the question, “Why do all the guys at Forks High like Bella if she's supposed to be average-looking? Is she pretty or not?”

Some parts of Bella's experiences are modeled after real life (my life, to be exact) in order to ground the fantasy aspects of the story in solid reality. Ironically, many of the details that are one hundred percent reality are the ones that are called into question the most (as illustrated by some of my angry Amazon reviews). In this particular case, I modeled Bella's move to Forks after my real life move from high school to college. (Personal story alert!) I mentioned in my bio that I went to a high school in Scottsdale, AZ, which is Arizona's version of Beverly Hills (picture the high school in the movie Clueless). In high school, I was a mousy, A-track wall-flower. I had a lot of incredible girlfriends, but I wasn't much sought after by the Y chromosomes, if you know what I mean. Then I went to college in Provo, Utah. Let me tell you, my stock went through the roof. See, beauty is a lot more subjective than you might think. In Scottsdale, surrounded by barbies, I was about a five. In Provo, surrounded by normal people, I was more like an eight.

I can accept that going from a big city to a small town might bump her number up a little. There are definitely people who are “small-town hot” but not “NY/LA hot”. Fine. But here’s what the text had to say:

“You don’t see yourself very clearly, you know. I’ll admit you’re dead on about the bad things,” he chuckled blackly, “but you didn’t hear what every human male in this school was thinking on your first day.”

Checkmate, Meyer. Edward says “every human male in this school”. I can accept more guys in Forks liking her than in Arizona, but come on? Every male in school? Even the gay ones? I guess there also aren't any lesbians at Bella's school either.

Oh, and as with all Mary Sues, Bella has one tiny little adorable flaw. She's clumsy. Laughably clumsy. Plot-convenience driven clumsy. This is only made worse by the fact that her clumsiness often induces knight-in-shining-armor behavior from men, resulting in Bella constantly needing to be saved. Now, I understand that when she's surrounded by vampires, she is the weakest and it wouldn't make sense for her to be kick-ass, but the fact that she also needs help when she's just walking is a little much for me to take. And Edward's constantly cheesy lines about how he can’t leave her alone for a second just sound extremely patronizing. And here come a bunch of them!

“I’ve never tried to keep a specific person alive before, and it’s much more troublesome than I would have believed. But that’s probably just because it’s you.” “Don’t be offended, but you seem to be one of those people who just attract accidents like a magnet. So…try not to fall into the ocean or get run over or anything, all right?” “You were right. I’m definitely fighting fate trying to keep you alive.” “I’m surprised that you did make it through a whole weekend unscathed.” “Are you referring to the fact that you can’t walk across a flat, stable surface without finding something to trip over?"

Bella is so utterly incompetent at walking. And it makes her absolutely incapable of taking care of herself. She constantly needs men to help her. It's infuriating. She almost gets hit by a car, but magical Edward is there to save her. She almost gets mugged/raped by some random Straw Men in Port Angeles, but luckily, Edward was stalking her so he could leap in to the rescue. This reinforces in young girls’ heads that they are helpless without a man around. And that being helpless is perfectly okay because one day, they'll find a big, strong, practically perfect in every way man so that all they need to do is sit around birthing babies.

Now I'd like to talk about the character of Bella, but she is so miraculously vague, especially given that the book is entirely in her point of view. What does come off, to me at least, is that she is horribly arrogant and ungrateful. She seems to have a bad enough relationship with her father that she calls him by his first name, but there is absolutely no evidence to suggest that he is anything but a genuinely nice, protective Papa. He buys her a car (more than a lot of parents would do), tries to be involved with her life (how dare he?!), and even seems rather guilty and embarrassed that he can't cook for her.

He seemed to feel awkward standing in the kitchen doing nothing; he lumbered into the living room to watch TV while I worked. We were both more comfortable that way.

This of course also reinforces such wonderful gender stereotypes. But the fact remains that Bella's treatment of her father seems rather unfair and unfounded, and pretty much just came off ungrateful and nasty. He didn't have to let her come move in with him to begin with, but he actually wanted her there, a fact she seems to take completely for granted.

Her snootiness is evident again when she meets Jessica, who as far as the book tells us, has done nothing but be nice and try to include Bella into her circle of friends. Again, this is more than a lot of teenage girls would do for the new kid in school. And yet, Bella seems extremely judgmental of Jessica simply because, I guess, she lives in Forks? I've been told by people that Jessica does actually turn out to be a bitch, but unless Bella shares Alice's “speshul” power, I don't take this as an excuse for her nastiness in the prose toward someone who is just trying to be friendly.

One girl sat next to me in both Trig and Spanish, and she walked with me to the cafeteria for lunch. […] I couldn’t remember her name, so I smiled and nodded as she prattled about teachers and classes. I didn’t try to keep up.

As if the use of the word “prattle” isn’t bad enough – it indicates Jessica is vapid and ditzy – Bella doesn’t even “try to keep up” with what Jessica is saying. Obviously she feels Jessica is below her. She isn’t even bothered to remember her name, nor does she seem to care that she doesn’t know it.

And then the fact that she's asked out by several guys to the dance is presented as merely annoying (which I'm sure it is), but not at all flattering. You’d think someone who’s never been noticed by guys before would find this overwhelming and exciting even if she isn’t interested in them. It’s also really hard to make anyone feel sorry for someone who has too many choices when it comes to guys.

Also, Bella likes to constantly point out to us in the prose that she has already done all the things that the kids in Forks are doing in school.

I kept my eyes down on the reading list the teacher had given me. It was fairly basic: Bronte, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Faulkner. I’d already read everything. That was comforting…and boring.

Is this a commentary on big city schools vs. small town schools? Perhaps, but it’s a rather unfounded and unfair conclusion. I think this is put in deliberately to make us think Bella is smart.

We had a pop quiz on Wuthering Heights. It was straightforward, very easy.

Are we meant to believe that it was easy for her because she was smart? Because it’s more likely that it was easy for her because she’d covered the material before. There is nothing smarter about being in a school that has a faster moving curriculum, and hell, there's not really evidence of that, only evidence that they are different curriculums. And anyone who has switched schools knows that no two schools work exactly the same in America. My friend (at a big city private school) and I (at a small town public school) read exactly the same books in high school, but we read them in different years. Also, the fact that Bella enjoys things like Charlotte Bronte tell us she's smart. You know what? If you were really smart, you'd still pay attention and just do it all again for review purposes or look into doing more challenging projects instead of the easy assignments you already know. Also:

I wondered if my mom would send me my folder of old essays

Lazy. Not smart.

I'm sure there's much more I can say, but let's move on to: Abuse = Love.

This is, much as people like to argue with me, a HUGE problem with the Edward/Bella relationship. I have been told by people that if I just read the short story that explains it all from Edward's point of view, it will all make sense and cease to be creepy and stalkerish. I disagree. Looking into the head of the perpetrator of terrible behavior makes the behavior understandable not excused. It's like holding up Lolita and proclaiming that NAMBLA or like-minded people have totally valid arguments because if you just read this book, you'll get it.

Let's talk about Edward/Bella, shall we? Her interest in him is spurred nearly completely by what she takes as his distaste for her.

Just as I passed, he suddenly went rigid in his seat. He stared at me again, meeting my eyes with the strangest expression on his face – it was hostile, furious. […] I kept my eyes down as I went to sit by him, bewildered by the antagonistic stare he’d given me. [ …] He was leaning away from me, sitting on the extreme edge of his chair and averting his face like he smelled something bad.

He treats her extremely rudely, acts like a total freak, and she can't stop thinking about him and starts becoming obsessed with solving the mystery that is the jerkface who sits next to her in biology. Now, I understand the curiosity, and I understand her wanting to know why some guy she's never really interacted with seems to hate her so much, but the difference to me is that most of the time, the guy who is treating you like shit rarely ends up being your "twu luv". He might be that asshole you dated for a while because he was hot or because you didn't have enough self-confidence to know you deserved better, but he should not be your true love, and the fact that Twilight represents this really bothers me. Especially given how seriously it's taken by teenage girls. As an adult reading it as a guilty pleasure, you can indulge yourself in the James Dean-esque bad boy with a heart of gold thing and then let it go and return to reality. I don’t believe that most teenage and pre-teens girls have the emotional maturity that would allow them to do this.

Twilight is reinforcing the idea that really, he just treats you that way because he loves you too much. (Sounds remarkably like classic spousal abuse defense, no?) And I'm not saying this was her intent, but unfortunately, it is what the book ends up doing. See, Edward's coldness and refusal to interact with her was really just him loving her too much. His sneaking into her room while she was sleeping every night for months was more evidence of his deep and meaningful love. And the true symbol of his affection is the fact that manages to keep from raping - er, I mean, biting - her as his nature as a man - er, uh, vampire - pressures him to do.

This is slightly off topic, but I get more than a little annoyed at how most media seems to believe that there is either making out or sex with absolutely nothing in between the two. To go past kissing immediately means having sex. Um, no. Untrue. Extremely untrue. And it bothers me that this idea is ingrained in teen's heads nowadays. To take this back to Twilight, let's look at the scene when they kiss, and this is her response:

Blood boiled under my skin, burned in my lips. My breath came in a wild gasp. My fingers knotted in his hair, clutching him to me. My lips parted as I breathed in his heady scent. Immediately I felt him turn to unresponsive stone beneath my lips. His hands gently, but with irresistible force, pushed my face back. I opened my eyes and saw his guarded expression. “Oops,” I breathed. “That’s an understatement.” [….] “Should I…?” I tried to disengage myself, to give him some room. His hands refused to let me move so much as an inch. “No, it’s tolerable.”

Her sexual arousal is “tolerable”? Not to mention, she did barely anything in this scene; the behavior was extremely tame and yet is represented as too much. While I can applaud the fact that the woman in the relationship is pushing for sex/vampirism and the man is the one refusing, the execution actually does more harm than good. It makes it seem like Bella's desires are dirty and wrong, thus pigeonholing women back into their "you can't enjoy sex" boxes. To look at some other examples:

There was really no excuse for my behavior. Obviously I knew better by now. And yet I couldn’t seem to stop from reacting exactly as I had the first time. Instead of keeping safely motionless, my arms reached up to twine tightly around his neck and I was suddenly welded to his stone figure. I sighed, and my lips parted. He staggered back, breaking my grip effortlessly. “Damn it, Bella!” he broke off, gasping. “You’ll be the death of me, I swear you will.”

Again, very slight sexual actions – Bella pressed her body into his – are portrayed as catastrophic to Edward’s ability to control himself sexually. (Remember, I’m looking at the “urge to bite” as equivalent to “urge to sleep with. Not to mention that the phrase “safely motionless” really irks me. It makes me think that women are just meant to lie there while they allow men have sex with them. Because god-forbid we, you know, enjoy it or something.

“What am I going to do with you?” he groaned in exasperation. “Yesterday I kiss you, and you attack me! Today you pass out on me!”

That’s right, his kiss was so passionate that she passed out. All he did before this happened was “[touch] his cool lips to mine for the second time, very carefully, parting them slightly”. That’s a pretty tame kiss. The book ends up presenting any form of sexual desire – no matter how slight – as a very big deal. And let’s note that he’s “exasperated” with her behavior. And when Edward restrains himself, it's supposed to be admirable rather than expected. He's so great! He can stop himself from raping people! My hero! To see this illustrated, take a look at this passage which occurs right after the first kiss when he pushes her away after she gets too into it:

He laughed aloud. “I’m stronger than I thought. It’s nice to know.” “I wish I could say the same. I’m sorry.”

Edward saying this is like he’s patting himself on the back for his self control. Because as a man, he can’t help but want to have sex with Bella. But apparently Bella’s desire to have sex with him is something to apologize for. Not to mention, she manages to spike his sexual desire by merely being a woman (albeit one with a super special smell, wtf?). And that is her fault.

Sex is not a decision teens should make lightly, and it's nice that Meyer wants to show them that you can be in love without having sex, but I think the harm rather outweighs the good in this case. Not to mention how the characters fit nicely into ye olde gender roles. Bella is the cook, the nurturer, the damsel in distress, and later even child-bearer while Edward is a manly man who saves and protects women when he's not making them feel like absolute shit and/or skeeving them the hell out.

Also I saw very little motivation for Edward's affections aside from "Bella's hawt". In fact, there seems to be very little motivation for any of the boys interested in her. As for Bella and Edward, they certainly don't seem to connect on an intellectual level, and why should they, given their age difference, because no matter how much the characters and first person prose try to tell us Bella is mature for her age, it just doesn't seem so. Basically their whole relationship is completely unbalanced; the two are not at all on equal footing, reinforcing the idea that men and women cannot be equal in a relationship either in power or intelligence.

This is also brings me to the idea of “love at first sight”. Edward falls in love with Bella pretty much the instant he sees her. He falls totally in love with her despite knowing absolutely nothing about her. And yet, despite her being plain and him never having spoken to her, he is protective and obsessed with her completely. I understand this is a fantasy of a relationship, but I’ve seen Harlequins try harder to create some sense of compatibility between their characters. And actually, none of the boys who vie for Bella’s affections do something as insane as getting to know her first.

Twilight is the worst of all the things it tries to be. It’s a bad vampire novel, it’s a bad romance, and it’s bad teen fiction. The vampires serve no real purpose to the book, other than to be “cool” or “hot”, and they are even stripped of their basic vampire identities. As a romance, the book fails because the relationship is abusive and the sexual aspects are seen as dirty and wrong rather than titillating. And the messages it gives to its teen audience are wholly irresponsible and set back women’s sexual freedom a few hundred years. The only thing Twilight succeeds at is being far more popular than its writing or premise should allow.

Themes:

Books

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Sci-fi / Fantasy

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Young Adult / Children

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Guy

at 01:40 on 2009-12-21

I kept my eyes down on the reading list the teacher had given me. It was fairly basic: Bronte, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Faulkner. I’d already read everything. That was comforting…and boring.

Yes, because any halfway smart teenage girl would have read and understood the complete works of Shakespeare, and as for Chaucer! Pfft, glance over it once and you know it all, of course it's going to be boring! Where's the experimental poetry written in Esperanto that every typical teenager hungers for in their unending quest for ever-more abstruse literary forms to satisfy their perfectly natural desire to move beyond something basic like Shakespeare or, *shudder*, Faulkner!

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at 02:06 on 2009-12-21I take issue with your belief that "most teenage girls" aren't capable of dealing with this kind of in a healthy way. This kind of thing is actually a big part of why the Twilight-hate phenomenon annoys me.

I haven't read them, but I've read a lot about them and a number of passages, and I have little doubt that they're as dreadful as people say. But there are a lot of dreadful things in the world. Similarly misanthropic and stereotypical fare aimed at male audiences--think james Bond or something--is almost never singled out for this kind of, in my mind, hyperbolic criticism. We say all the time, and rightly, that James Bond, or Generic Sci-Fi/Action movie glorifies violence and sexism in an inappropriate way, but rarely do we accuse a specific author of "damaging" the nations male youth. I think there's probably a substantial pool of savvy young women who know exactly what the score is but read Twilight anyway.

On the substance of the article: Counterfactual criticism alert!

I don't actually have a problem with the idea that she has no need to work on her school's curriculum; it seems like a fairly self-conscious plot device to facilitate the demands of this genre's plots.

Basically, creating a justification for why she doesn't have to work at schools so she has more time to devote the adventures and trials of the actual plot. Especially in a fantasy story involving our heroes being initiated into a "secret world," that seems pretty much necessary unless the story is *about* the difficulty of juggling magic and high school.

It comes off badly because Bella is such an annoying character, but I suggest that if she used the time she saved to compose music, build robots in her garage, or even flirt with some dude who was vaguely interesting, you wouldn't have objected.

Re: Belledward

I've not read the books and have no desire to, but Kit Whitfield has an interesting and more sympathetic take: she considers the book a depiction of a fantastic, diealized BDSM relationship:

"for instance, dragging her to the prom, Edward finds Bella exlaiming 'in horror' and 'mortified' - which he responds to with a masterful, 'Don't be difficult, Bella.' This would sound like genuine objections on her part if her real protest was at being taken to a dance she wants to avoid. But making her dance is merely a lily-white way of pressing her limits; when they get going it's like this:

"Edward." My throat was so dry I could only manage a whisper. " I honestly can't dance!" I could feel the panic bubbling up inside my chest.

"Dont worry, silly," he whispered back. "I can." He put my arms around his neck and lifted me to slide his feet under mine.

And then we were whirling, too.

"I feel like I'm five years old," I laughed after a few minutes of effortless waltzing.

Bella is scared, but when skilfully pushed over the edge she finds herself having a wonderful time; this is an interplay of dominance and submission, Edward making Bella do things she discovers she actually wanted, rather than serious coercion. Words like 'gulped' and 'pouted' keep coming up, which is hardly the language of genuine resistance. The real reason Bella was upset is not that he's ignored her insistence that she doesn't want to go, it's that she thought tonight might be the night he vamped her and he's disappointed her 'half-fearful hopes'. She doesn't mind Edward making her do stuff; what she minds is when he won't make her do it. And in fact, as I'll mention later, when they finally do get down to business, Bella seems quite capable of erotic pain as well."

Not having read the book, I don't know whether this is a plausible construction; I suspect that it's probably partially valid, but that the quality of the writing introduces some regrettable morals anyway.

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at 02:07 on 2009-12-21Sorry for the double post, but forgot to link Whitfield:

http://www.kitwhitfield.com/2009_08_01_archive.html

The post is "Innocent Libertinism" about halfway down the page.

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Arthur B

at 02:27 on 2009-12-21I posted

this

a while ago in the Playpen, but it's buried now, and it pretty much sums up my feelings on the subject. :)

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Arthur B

at 02:35 on 2009-12-21

We say all the time, and rightly, that James Bond, or Generic Sci-Fi/Action movie glorifies violence and sexism in an inappropriate way, but rarely do we accuse a specific author of "damaging" the nations male youth.

There is a difference, though. James Bond, Rambo, Conan and their ilk go around kicking ass, laying down the law, and generally exerting authority over the situation throughout their lives. They are active, independent, and don't wait around for permission to go and get what they want.

Bella, based on Viorica's assessment here, is almost the complete reverse of that. She is passive to a fault. She wanders around getting into trouble. Then Edward shows up and helps her out. She gets into more trouble. Edward shows up and helps her out again. She basically allows Edward a control of her life which, if it's like Viorica describes, is complete to an almost frightening degree.

Now, imagine a young man who goes through life with the attitude of James Bond. Not in terms of going around shooting people, that's clearly fantasy, but in terms of taking on Bond's no-nonsense, take-charge attitude. What you would have there is a lad who takes the lead, who is proactive, who goes out and grabs life by the throat! In other words,

management material!

That boy will go far!

Now, imagine a girl who goes through life with Bella's attitude. Would you consider this to be empowering, like the scenario I outline above, or

massively disempowering

?

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Melissa G.

at 02:41 on 2009-12-21

I take issue with your belief that "most teenage girls" aren't capable of dealing with this kind of in a healthy way. This kind of thing is actually a big part of why the Twilight-hate phenomenon annoys me.

It's completely fair of you to take issue with it. And honestly, it's not just the teenage girls that do it; I've heard adult fans talk about the books without hearing any indication that they understand that Edward would be a horrible boyfriend in real life. And after hearing teenage girls in the school where I teach trying to defend the horrible behavior of their bfs to each other ("But you don't get WHY he cheated on me. Really, it's okay."), I'd rather lean on the side of caution with that one, personally.

it seems like a fairly self-conscious plot device to facilitate the demands of this genre's plots.

The problem is, I really don't read it that way at all. The book pretty much takes place exclusively in her school or around regular teenage activities. As far the first book goes, until the end, it's very much grounded in the every day. It's all focused around regular life: school and romance. So it would be completely natural to have her dealing with both homework and trying to have a social life. But, again, if she didn't come off so snotty about it, maybe I wouldn't care so much.

she considers the book a depiction of a fantastic, diealized BDSM relationship:

Oh, there's definitely some BD/fantasy rape aspects going on in there. A lot of romances fall into this trap, and this one is no different. Honestly, if this book weren't so popular, I wouldn't even give it a second glance. I'd just chalk it up to another bad romance novel with vampires. The fact that it has exploded this way makes me feel the need to point out its extreme flaws whenever I can b/c I'm confrontation that way. :-)

@Arthur

I loved that comic. It made me giggle.

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Melissa G.

at 02:42 on 2009-12-21Wrong author, Arthur, but I forgive you. :-)

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Melissa G.

at 02:48 on 2009-12-21

Edward making Bella do things she discovers she actually wanted, rather than serious coercion.

Sorry for multiple posts, but I just want to point out that the problem with this kind of thing is that it skates dangerously close to "No means yes." And while a common fantasy!rape aspect, it does not translate well into real life.

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Arthur B

at 02:59 on 2009-12-21

Wrong author, Arthur, but I forgive you. :-)

A sure sign that I've been staying up too late revising. Goodnight all!

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at 04:19 on 2009-12-21Melissa,

Re: "No means yes" -- first, let me say that I absolutely have no illusions about Stphanie Myers as a person. She publicly and repeatedly espouses destructive and horrifying values, and her own statements to the effect that Bella and Edward's is an unqualified ideal are problematic.

Setting her aside though and looking at the text--well, it depends on who you think it's talking to. Kit Whitfield's argument is that, just as erotica aimed at vanilla audiences often glosses over some or all of the anxiety, the miscommunication, the STI risk, and the need to learn what a new partner needs, letting our heroes have good sex the first time out, BDSM erotica omits the negotiation, safewords, and so on that are required for safe and healthy BDSM practice in the real world.

So then what do you make of its popularity? There's certainly an argument to be made that it's fandom is so ubiquitous it's obviously not *only* being appreciated by the kink community, or even by people with kinks they're no conscious of, but that on the contrary its phenomenal popularity is a sign that our culture, problematically, assumes female submission as a default value. It even sounds to me like because Ms. Myers didn't *intend* to write a BDSM Romance, the text itself blurs the lines between consensual BDSM and abuse in a skeevy way.

That said,I'm attracted to the BDSM interpretation because, well, I have friends who like Twilight and I'd like to think better of their taste. And while this can't be the entire explanation, I do think that these kinds of kinks are a lot more common than anybody lets on, and so I don't think the mainstreaming of kink, even femsub, is a harm *per se* and I think a careful critic can, and should, criticize the flaws in this particular book without condemning all femsub erotica.

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at 04:30 on 2009-12-21

I've not read the books and have no desire to, but Kit Whitfield has an interesting and more sympathetic take: she considers the book a depiction of a fantastic, diealized BDSM relationship:

So this is probably a bit off topic and (disclaimer) I don't speak from experience but from some research. As far as I understand what makes a healthy BDSM relationship is the knowledge and communication.

You don't just find yourself in a such a relationship (unromatic I know) you go into the relationship with the foreknowledge that you are entering a BDSM relationship with previously discussed and set up fail-safes so you and your partner don't end up crossing any lines. Which is what is missing in Twilight (and 1 million other romance novels). It's all the titillation of BDSM without any of the foundations that make it safe and fun.

So while I don't fault Twilight for it's romanticized BDSM it is part of whole genre of romantic BDSM and fantasy!rape. I don't think I could call it a good representation of a functioning BDSM relationship.

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Melissa G.

at 04:33 on 2009-12-21

So then what do you make of its popularity?

I imagine it's the same reason that we find this "BDSM/fantasy!rape" in the majority of romance novels. I'm not a psychologist or sociologist, but I can make a guess where the attraction comes from - even to someone who doesn't have that "kink".

The fantasy!rape situation allows for two things. 1) The woman doesn't have to admit to wanting sex and thus is spared the shame of having sexual desire. (She shouldn't have this shame, but because of things like Victorian age repression, a lot of women do.) and 2) It gives something of an ego boast to think that you are so sexy/amazing that he just can't control himself and must have you NOW! (Not to mention the long-standing idea that women are only worthwhile if they're attractive and what's a better gauge of your attractiveness than having a guy unable to control his sexual desires around you).

I definitely think the attraction to the fantasy!rape is embedded in the negative ways society treats/views women's sexuality. But sadly, I can totally see the attraction in these ideas, and I know I'm not alone. I mean, most romance is written by women for women and includes - what would be in the real world - very self-destructive behaviors. "No means yes" being the major one. And the thing is, I find nothing wrong with women taking private delight in this idea as long as they know full well that they are reading trashy romance novels and that this is a FANTASY.

The problem I have with Twilight falling into this category of romance is that it's marketed toward teens rather than adults, and it pretend to have wholesome, positive messages toward sex like, "Don't have sex before marriage".

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Melissa G.

at 04:58 on 2009-12-21And I want to clarify that I'm not saying that people who partake in BDSM are in some way perpetrating "negative female beahavior" or anything. What they are doing is between two consenting partners who have discussed all this beforehand. And I have no problem with BDSM and those who do it.

I'm speaking directly to why fantasy!rape is such an attractive idea to women.

**I'm going to bed so it may be a while before I'm able to respond again, fyi.

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Rami

at 05:13 on 2009-12-21The impression I'm getting from this discussion is that interpreting it as an idealized dom/sub relationship would assume a level of relative sensibility and communication between the people involved that isn't actually supported by the text. Which makes said interpretation rather problematic. Or have I missed something?

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at 05:24 on 2009-12-21

The impression I'm getting from this discussion is that interpreting it as an idealized dom/sub relationship would assume a level of relative sensibility and communication between the people involved that isn't actually supported by the text. Which makes said interpretation rather problematic. Or have I missed something?

yes or at least that is what I was awkwardly aiming at.

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at 05:25 on 2009-12-21@Ninjacatman

What you say about BDSM is also how I understand the matter to be. I tried to say as much somewhere in my wall of text. The trick is, while communication and trust are the difference between BDSM play and abuse, they're also the difference between a good vanilla relationship and a shitty one.

Erotic fiction generally doesn't bother to depict all of the set-up work required for a healthy vanilla relationship, so it seems to me that BDSM erotica should get the same fantasy-license--at least when it's clearly labeled. The trouble with Twilight is that it isn't marketed as BDSM and its author doesn't acknowledge it as a kinky relationship.

@Melissa G.

I don't think children are as in need of protection as you seem to feel. Sure, some children get bad ideas from things they read: I got plenty of bad ideas about life from my own fantasy diet, though I like to think I didn't absorb too much of the misogyny.

But teenagers can be pretty savvy readers, and especially in the age of internet fandom I think it's pretty obvious that teenagers can engage critically with their favorite texts and decide what they like and what they don't. Furthermore, setting aside the example of Twilight specifically, i'm concerned that you feel fantasy!rape is something only adult women should be permitted to read about.

Teenagers are people who are growing into their sexuality and exploring their sexual imagination, and I think consciously chose "exploring" over "forming." Most of the kinky people I know well enough to discuss this with reported basically having their kinks from a very early age, often before they had a real awareness of sexuality. Sure, the way our media sexualises violence probably shapes the way some teenagers perceive sexuality, but it's important to remember that teendom isn't any child's first exposure to the media; those ideas have been around for a while.

On the basis of the anecdotal evidence available to me, I think a substantial number of people reach the age of 13 with a pre-existing and life-long attraction to fantasy!rape. To tell those people of either gender that they, unlike their vanilla peers, don't deserve access to sexually compelling literature seems a little repressive.

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Rami

at 05:31 on 2009-12-21

To tell those people of either gender that they, unlike their vanilla peers, don't deserve access to sexually compelling literature seems a little repressive.

I don't think anyone has suggested that so far.

I think a substantial number of people reach the age of 13 with a pre-existing and life-long attraction to fantasy!rape

That seems like an odd conclusion to draw, and while I obviously don't know the anecdotal evidence available to you, I personally would find such a conclusion extremely dubious.

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at 05:33 on 2009-12-21Melissa,

Sorry for double--post, I didn't see your latest comment before posting mine, which reassures me that your heart is in the right place. I stand by the substance of the comment though: Twilight may be problematic, but to state as you seem to that fantasy!rape is not appropriate material for teenage girls is, in my opinion, too far.

@Rami,

Idealized, not ideal. It's not a depiction of a relationship that would be healthy in real life; it's a relationship that only works in a fantasy world where you and your partner magically want the same thing without discussion.

Rennaissance fair fetishists don't (usually) read stories about people dressing as kings and queens, they read stories about fantasy!kings and fantasy!queens. Similarly, people who like pretending to be abused in real life would generally prefer to read about fantasy!abuse than other people pretending to be abused.

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at 05:35 on 2009-12-21

Erotic fiction generally doesn't bother to depict all of the set-up work required for a healthy vanilla relationship, so it seems to me that BDSM erotica should get the same fantasy-license--at least when it's clearly labeled. The trouble with Twilight is that it isn't marketed as BDSM and its author doesn't acknowledge it as a kinky relationship.

Yes, sorry I hadn't realized you posted again. My point isn't that it's bad erotica but that I don't know if I would feel comfortable calling it idealized or a good BDSM relationship rather than just calling it good erotica (which often seems to be based around bad relationships).

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Melissa G.

at 05:44 on 2009-12-21

i'm concerned that you feel fantasy!rape is something only adult women should be permitted to read about.

Oh, not at all! Teens should be free to explore and develop their sexuality as they come into it. I'd rather they be informed than not. But these romanticized texts of "fantasy!rape" and "fantasy!BDSM" need to be categorized as such. Twilight is definitely not. It's packaged as a loving, ideal relationship.

As someone who had been attracted to the idea of fantasy!rape early on as well as being a feminist, I had to really work through these things in my mind to try and understand where the attraction came from. And I had to work to draw that line in my mind that this would not be acceptable in "real life" but as a "fantasy" is fine. (Like I said, BDSM in it's true form is fine in real life b/c it follows certain rules and guidelines in its community that are not present in its fantasy/romanticized incarnations.)

But I do have to admit that the idea of someone writing erotica *marketed* toward teens makes me a little squeamish. If teens find erotica themselves and buy it full well understanding what it is, I'm fine with that. What I object to the use of it in Twilight b/c of how Twilight is packaged.

**Okay, to bed for real this time. Back later.

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Rami

at 05:52 on 2009-12-21

Idealized, not ideal. It's not a depiction of a relationship that would be healthy in real life; it's a relationship that only works in a fantasy world

Ah, I think I see where you're coming from. In which case my objection becomes the same as Melissa's: everywhere I've seen it being pushed, it's being pushed as an ideal -- something to aspire to, something that could happen, something that people should actively search for. I've actually spoken to adults who lauded it as a perfect relationship that they wished they could have found. And that's absurd, and simply reinforces already-unrealistic portrayals of what relationships should be.

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at 06:55 on 2009-12-21I have to go with the person said that all the anti-Twilight feeling based on the idea that the books are so damaging to young, impressionable women is bothersome. Dare I even say that that mentality - that girls need to be shielded in a way that boys never seem to need to be - is anti-feminist? Because it implies a quality of moral/mental character exists in men that is lacking in women. To use the James Bond to Sam Whittacker examples: Both are high-fantasy male characters (starring in badly written, plot-holed filled stories) that have the potential to influence little boys as badly as Bella is supposed to influence little girls. But very few people seem to think that teenage boys need to be told that while slapping women around worked for Sean Connery, it won't work for them/land them in jail. And Sam Whittacker, probably the most repulsive male wish-fulfillment character of the decade, doesn't come with a cautionary sign either. Don't let me touch Watchmen, or Harry Potter and the bad messages Rowling sends out to both boys *and* girls e.g. You "mature" when you fool around with a girl that likes you to get the attention of the one you do. Oops, I gues I did touch it after all.

What I'm trying to say in a rather long-winded way is that it's hard for me to be suddenly upset about Twilight's negative messages when, in my opinion, more damaging media works have been existence and will no doubt, continue to be in existence, with nary a comment. Neither can I help but wonder if the pro-feminist criticism is actually walking on some anti-feminist legs: Twilight is targeted because its female author wrote a female-viewpoint story for a female audience and has had the affrontery to, against all odds, be successful.

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Melissa G.

at 07:25 on 2009-12-21

But very few people seem to think that teenage boys need to be told that while slapping women around worked for Sean Connery, it won't work for them/land them in jail.

See, in my opinion, yes. Yes, this really does need to be told to young boys. But, the other thing is, that James Bond movies are not *targeted* nor *marketed* to young boys. Neither was Watchmen, which I hated. They are marketed toward adults, and are rated as such. If kids see them and get ideas in their heads they aren't mature enough to fully understand, I really do believe that someone needs to sit down and set them straight.

And, oh, god, yes, Harry Potter bothers me IMMENSELY. But I'm not talking about JKR here. I'm talking about Twilight and Meyer.

Twilight is targeted because its female author wrote a female-viewpoint story for a female audience and has had the affrontery to, against all odds, be successful.

The reason I take issue with her being a female writer is because I do feel like she should have more sense than to write what she does. The same way I think Rowling should have more sense than to write what she does about women. And, yes, men shouldn't do it either, and that's why we're far more likely to call them out on it when they do. But we seem to like to give women a pass for writing sexist material because "women can't possibly be sexist!" Which is completely untrue. And that's the only reason I mentioned her gender at all.

Twilight has a rather irresponsible, damaging message for everyone when it tries to call Bella/Edward an ideal relationship. And putting that aside, it's badly written and poorly conceived. It's just plain not a good book. And part of that has a lot to do with it saying it's doing one thing and unintentionally doing another - the very same thing we all take issue with Harry Potter for doing. So I don't understand why it's acceptable to attack Rowling and not Meyer.

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at 07:45 on 2009-12-21Rowling is an excelletn parallel though; there's plenty of Rowling criticism on this website calling it badly written, the characters awful and unappealing, and the moral message hrrifying. But I've never seen anyone, on this site or really anywhere, call Harry Potter "damaging" and suggest that it's dangerous for kids to read it.

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Melissa G.

at 08:01 on 2009-12-21If people took the morality lessons of Harry Potter and emulated them, I would call that "damaging" personally. And to bring back something Rami said above:

I've actually spoken to adults who lauded it as a perfect relationship that they wished they could have found.

This is what is damaging. This is an actual problem. If you can read Twilight and dismiss it as trashy romantic fun, I have no problem with that. It's the above behavior - wanting to emulate the Bella/Edward relationship and have it for yourself - that I find so disturbing.

I'm not saying people

shouldn't

read Twilight. I'm saying they should fully recognize and understand it as a fantasy of a relationship. If they don't, that's when it gets damaging.

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Arthur B

at 08:11 on 2009-12-21Like I allude to above with my second comment on the article (waaaaay, long ago), I think the reason that people bring up the "damaging" tag more often with Twilight than with HP is that the damage which could come from someone taking the lessons of Twilight to heart is very, very obvious. Women already get trapped in abusive relationships with controlling men far, far too often; we really don't need more media telling us that Abuse Is Love, Freedom Is Slavery, and Ignorance Is Strength.

That said, I do think Potter has messages which are equally damaging - I'm particularly concerned by the fact that it seems to say "If the voice of authority is ugly and telling you things you don't want to hear, it's evil, if it seems like a kindly old man who occasionally keeps things secret from you for your own good, it's OK". But I would argue that you need to look at Potter far more carefully to find the dubious messages than you do Twilight, where the troubling factor is the

very premise

of the story.

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at 09:08 on 2009-12-21I'm a little bit uncomfortable continuing this discussion. I got into it for the wrong reasons (emotional annoyance at reading *yet more Twilight bashing* coupled with a joy in nitpicking--did you know, for instance, that your assertion that vampires shouldn't be able to go out in the sun is contradicted by none other than the original Dracula?). I haven't read the book in question, which puts in the position of arguing about the book Ms. Whitfield suggested exists, not a book I know was actually written.

I also have every conceivable conflict of interest: I'm a barely-ex-teenage man with minor dominant fantasies in a relationship with a woman with submissive fantasies dating from her early childhood. My objectivity on this issue is probably thoroughly compromised.

I feel the need to lay that out there because what I have to say is somewhat confrontational: Your most recent comment, that you "have no problem" with reading twilight as trashy fun, and are only criticizing those who "laud it as a perfect relationship." I don't think that's an accurate summary of what you've posted.

It's true that's how you begin the OP, with an introduction I agree with absolutely. But the post seems to me to take a turn sideways here:

As an adult reading it as a guilty pleasure, you can indulge yourself in the James Dean-esque bad boy with a heart of gold thing and then let it go and return to reality. I don’t believe that most teenage and pre-teens girls have the emotional maturity that would allow them to do this.

In later comments, you added:

Oh, there's definitely some BD/fantasy rape aspects going on in there. A lot of romances fall into this TRAP (emphasis mine)

"I definitely think the attraction to the fantasy!rape is embedded in the negative ways society treats/views women's sexuality."

I'll agree with you as long as you strictly mean fantasy RAPE, but although you've used the terms interchangably (and I've followed suit), rape-play is not the whole of BDSM. I do believe that rape fantasy would go away in an egalitarian society; ritualized submission would not.

The Ms. Whitfield quote wasn't a scene in which Edward's fangs/dick were even an issue. It was about him managing her life, making her choices for her. This is, of course, the manifestation of thousands of years of patriarchal culture filtered through Myers' Mormon upbringing, and the author seems wrongheadedly to think that this is the natural order of things. But, it's also a compelling fantasy in its own right. I've had submissive fantasies in the past as well, and as someone who agonizes over small decisions and generally frets my life away, I'm prepared to claim that surrendering control is a fantasy whose appeal is not inherently rooted in sexism.

The problem I have with Twilight falling into this category of romance is that it's marketed toward teens rather than adults, and it pretend to have wholesome, positive messages toward sex...

"I do have to admit that the idea of someone writing erotica *marketed* toward teens makes me a little squeamish"

I'll try my hardest here not to put words in your mouth. I wrote and erased a few sentences of the form "it seems you have a problem with..." and then "I think the basic issues is that we don't see eye to eye on..." Let me just say that it is these statements that comments have raised my eyebrows and leave it at that. The following also caught my attention:

"As someone who *had been* (mine) attracted to the idea of fantasy!rape early on as well as being a feminist"

Do you mean to imply that you are no longer attracted to fantasy!rape? If so, how do you feel about this? Do you consider it a point of pride, or feel more mature for having outgrown it?

Finally, I wanted to comment on this:

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at 09:11 on 2009-12-21Wow, somehow the end of my comment got click-dragged into the middle. I hate my touchpad. And need sleep. The discussion of this line: "I definitely think the attraction to the fantasy!rape is embedded in the negative ways society treats/views women's sexuality."

Was supposed to be the end of the post. The post continues from:

Oh, there's definitely some BD/fantasy rape aspects going on in there. A lot of romances fall into this TRAP (emphasis mine)

directly to

"The problem I have with Twilight falling into this category of romance is that it's marketed toward teens rather than adults, and it pretend to have wholesome, positive messages toward sex..."

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at 09:45 on 2009-12-21Transformers, Watchmen (and the whole comic-book industry) and Harry Potter (Rowling was asked to use de-gendered initials so as not to frighten away the testosterone contingent) are targeted and marketed towards young boys. As for James Bond, some of the movies have been severely edited in the past (Goldeneye, License to Kill) to ensure that they do not exceed a PG-13 rating. So young boys may not be a primary target, but they're still part of the catchment market.

I'm not sure that the "women should have more sense" argument is one that empowers women in anyway. It's basically judging women on a different standard from men which is part of the inequality that feminism fights against. My argument isn't that Meyer isn't sexist by virtue of being a woman, or writing a woman's story. My argument is that I don't see this level of outrage directed at male-created & male-targeted stories. It is harmless-enough-to-ignore fantasy when it's men who are making it, but when it's made by a woman, it's suddenly dangerous and book-burning-worthy.

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Arthur B

at 10:10 on 2009-12-21@katsullivan:

It is harmless-enough-to-ignore fantasy when it's men who are making it, but when it's made by a woman, it's suddenly dangerous and book-burning-worthy.

Last time I'm going to repeat myself on this topic, I promise: all of the examples cited of stories aimed at young boys/men involve male protagonists who are quite specifically empowered in the texts concerned. (With the arguable exception of Harry Potter, but in that case he's going about doing precisely what an older wiser man wanted him to do.) The complaints about Twilight tend to centre on how much Bella is

dis

empowered. Given that we live in a society which empowers men to the hilt but isn't very good at empowering women, I think mildly different treatment of the subject matter is warranted.

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Arthur B

at 10:12 on 2009-12-21(Which isn't, of course, to say that the fantasies promoted for young men are beyond criticism on the basis that they empower men at the expense of women. They absolutely should be criticised on that basis. But that's a different criticism from saying "this story encourages people to surrender what empowerment they have.")

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http://katsullivan.insanejournal.com/

at 12:12 on 2009-12-21I've always seen how much or how little Bella is empowered as a subjective thing because the anti-Bella arguments that populate the Net have run the spectrum of her agency in the story, from complaining about it being too much to being too little.

What I have noticed is the common denominator is the bad example Bella and Twilight gives to women. Regardless of how empowered Bond, Potter or Whittacker are, they aren't giving good examples to men, either.

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Arthur B

at 12:18 on 2009-12-21Do you have a link to any of these arguments that say Bella is overempowered? I'd be interested to see them, most of the criticism I've seen takes the opposite view.

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Wardog

at 12:25 on 2009-12-21Ye Gods, I go to bed for one night and this happens.

First of all:

@Arthur

Firstly, James Bond is fairly blatantly a sexual masochist - I don't know how that fits into the idea of empowering role models for men. Not that I'm not saying sexual masochists can't be empowering or role models, it's just a bit off the beaten path (lol) for aspirational literature.

Secondly, is there any problem, inherently, with what might be considered "non empowering fantasies "for women? I mean, there's definitely a distinction between "you should be like this" and sheer fantasy-space, which is how most people see Twilight.

@Orionsnebula

Thanks for all your coments by the way, all very interesting, especially the link to Ms Whitfield. I tend to roll my eyes at Twilight but I'm not necessarily as incensed about it as Melissa - I actually enjoyed the first book, and thought it was a fun fantasy, but then I got rather squicked by the later books when I realised the problems associated with Meyer's profound lack of self-awareness. The thing is, as you yourself, acknowledge (and I'm sorry I lost the direct quote in all the text), although Whitfield's reading is compelling, it is not actually *directly* supported by the text, it's something you can read out of it in an effort to make it more interesting / acceptable. A bit like The Taming of the Shrew - you can read that as a consensual BDSM relationship between two difficult adults who have finally met their match (and I saw a version of it that *really* played this up - lots of pretty explicit hints to show they both knew entirely what they were up to, and having lots of fun with it) OR you can read it offensive, patriarchal, misogynist propaganda.

I don't have any problems with the idea that Bella/Edward ARE in a BDSM relationship, I just think that you've got a problem if they're UNCONSCIOUSLY involved in one, and the author has no idea what she's doing.

Again, I have no problem with teenagers confronting these issues per se but I don't think via Twilight is the route.

And the fact that Bella is as wet as an October afternoon (metaphorically I mean) further compromises the BDSM reading - I don't have much insight into the submissive mindset myself but I think most people would agree that submissive women are strong, capable and independent who *choose* to submit. Bella seems genuinely incapable of staying alive most of the time - there'd be very pleasure little in the submission of someone so blatantly rubbish :) Sorry, that's a slightly frivolous point but ultimately reading Bella as a submissive does no kindness to submissives.

And finally: @Melissa et al

The romance/rape device. Come on folks, get your heads out of the 70s. This is a *MUCH LESS COMMON* device than people seem to realise. In fact, I can't remember the last time I encountered it in a modern romance (oh, wait I can, it's Claiming the Courtesan) - if there is an element of sexual submission, texts are at a much greater liberty to address it directly, rather cloaking it behind a facade of rape fantasy. Again, you can still find rape fantasies if you're looking for them (see CtC above) but, again, they tend to be served up with self-knowledge, self-awareness and in much more "healthy" fantasy contexts. The problem with the "rape" fantasy is that it often attempted to address in an underhand way a lot of seemingly less acceptable fantasies - the idea that a man was so into he couldn't stop him, sexual submission, abdication of responsibilities to pleasure etc. etc. It's not a fantasy about rape per se, it's a fantasy about other things connected to the idea of being raped. Nowadays these ideas can be directly addressed and explored so the 'need' for the hero to rape the heroine has diminished.

I most assuredly don't believe that fantasy rape is embedded in the negative ways society treats/views female sexuality. I don't think you give women enough credit for their fantasies, and I do, in fact, believe it can be perfectly healthy fantasy.

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Arthur B

at 12:34 on 2009-12-21

Secondly, is there any problem, inherently, with what might be considered "non empowering fantasies "for women? I mean, there's definitely a distinction between "you should be like this" and sheer fantasy-space, which is how most people see Twilight.

I think the main thrust of Melissa's argument is that there are a disturbing number of people who really do see Twilight as an ideal for living, though.

There is, of course, absolutely no problem with fantasy-space taken as fantasy space. And there will always, of course, be a certain proportion of an audience that takes a fantasy outside fantasy-space, but that's their problem, not the author's. I suppose the real question is whether the proportion of Twilight's readers to take the ideas out of fantasy-space and decide that Bella is someone they should try to be is more or less the proportion you'd expect, or whether it's disproportionately large. This is not a question which anecdotal evidence can really answer, and until we set up the Ferret Statistics Bureau is probably not something we're likely to sort out here...

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Melissa G.

at 12:39 on 2009-12-21@orions

I stated many times that I have no problem with BDSM in its true form. It follows specific rules and guidelines that make it safe and enjoyable for those involved. Do I partake in it personally? No, I don't. But I have no problem with those who do.

The issue I was addressing - and I should have made it more clear - is the romanticized versions of BDSM and rape that you see in romance novels all the time. Because I think there is a big difference between not only real BDSM and fantasy!BDSM but also between fantasy!BDSM and fantasy!rape.

And I did purposely clarify that I wasn't trying to say that those who practice BDSM in real life are somehow sexist or anti-feminist - I was referring specifically to where the attraction to fantasy!rape comes from. And also there's nothing wrong with being attracted to fantasy!rape material.

And yes, I still read manga that reeks of fantasy!rape. But the fantasy!rape phenomena to me is completely different from rape-play, etc in real life because in the story these are not people who are consciously taking part in said behavior. It's just plain "actual rape" in which the person being violated actually doesn't mind so much. Fantasy!rape is just that. A fantasy. And it should never be confused with reality or - in my opinion - rape play between two consenting partners. Because while I enjoy reading about it, I certainly have no intentions or desire to act it out in real life.

Re: Dracula, it's been a while since I read it, but I'm pretty sure the vampires could not go out during the day, which is what I specified was a criteria.

I'm honestly willing to just agree to disagree with you at this point if you'd be more comfortable putting the conversation to bed.

My argument is that I don't see this level of outrage directed at male-created & male-targeted stories.

You don't? Because I certainly have. On this very site, for example. I feel we're far more likely to call men out on sexist behavior than we are women, and that *is* holding them to a different standard. Maybe I shouldn't have specified her gender; maybe I should have just said that the book was sexist and leave it at that. Because whether or not the writer was male or female, the book has some out-dated views about sex and sexuality. I'd be just as angry about this if it had been written by a male.

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Melissa G.

at 12:46 on 2009-12-21

This is a *MUCH LESS COMMON* device than people seem to realise.

The thing, Kyra, I read a lot of Boys Love manga, and it's all over the place in that. To the point where it starts to get disturbing. But I do admit that it's more common the more old-fashioned romance novels, and I'll take your word for it as I assume you read more romance than I do.

It's not a fantasy about rape per se, it's a fantasy about other things connected to the idea of being raped.

And yes, I totally agree with this.

I most assuredly don't believe that fantasy rape is embedded in the negative ways society treats/views female sexuality. I don't think you give women enough credit for their fantasies, and I do, in fact, believe it can be perfectly healthy fantasy.

I think it can be a healthy fantasy too. And as I said, I was merely trying to figure out where the attraction comes from. I'm not trying to submit that idea as fact.

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Melissa G.

at 13:03 on 2009-12-21I just want to clarify that I have no problem with anyone's personal fantasies or kinks. There's nothing unhealthy about having them. And if I insinuated to anyone that they should be ashamed or embarrassed about their fantasies, I do sincerely apologize.

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Wardog

at 13:12 on 2009-12-21I'm pretty sure nobody is genuinely annoyed - and equally pretty sure you weren't disparaging anybody's sexual preferences. I read through this when I woke up this morning and it seemed like lively discussion. Honestly, after the Graceling fiasco we're all way too nervy about stepping on each other's toes :)

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Melissa G.

at 14:28 on 2009-12-21I also realize that I wasn't being entirely clear when I said:

I definitely think the attraction to the fantasy!rape is embedded in the negative ways society treats/views women's sexuality.

I don't mean that having that fantasy or enjoying that fantasy makes you inherently sexist. I was trying to come at it from an extremely analytical point of view and how it works on a subconscious level. I think the attraction arises more out of a "coping mechanism" to the Madonna/Whore complex women have to live with every day and not that women who have these fantasies are in some way sexist. That wasn't at all what I meant to imply. I hope that makes it clearer what I was going for there and that I didn't just dig myself in deeper.

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Sister Magpie

at 15:41 on 2009-12-21Regarding Bella being over-empowered, I wonder if the point isn't that she's over-special? Doesn't she gain superspecial vampire powers, and two of them instead of one, and have no trouble controlling them right off? I would assume that's what people are referring to--but within the text she presumably remains as passive as ever in terms of her life.

I have a friend who was recently questioning the hatred of Twilight in terms of asking: How come when something is known as being loved by teenaged boys it's generally considered cool, but if it's known as loved by teenaged girls it's lame lame lame? I couldn't help but think of this here with the discussion of how there's less concern that boys be sheilded from something like HP--especially since I can understand the double standard in a way.

But part of it, for me, is maybe that I do feel a little embarassed when this kind of teen girl fantasy gets so popular. At least one conservative politician jumped on it as proof that despite what those unnatural feminists say this just proves that what girls really want is a man to obsess over their beauty and protect them while they are passively loved.

Which is maybe part of the danger. Not only do embarassing male adolescent fantasies tend to tread more into the danger zone of disrespecting other people while the female version comes close to disrespecting yourself, but girl fantasies--no matter if they are just a healthy part of their exploration of their own sexuality--is more likely to be manipulated to serve men. If we imagine a man and a woman both hopelessly stuck in immature fantasies the woman tends to risk ending up in a worse position.

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Arthur B

at 15:58 on 2009-12-21

Not only do embarassing male adolescent fantasies tend to tread more into the danger zone of disrespecting other people while the female version comes close to disrespecting yourself, but girl fantasies--no matter if they are just a healthy part of their exploration of their own sexuality--is more likely to be manipulated to serve men. If we imagine a man and a woman both hopelessly stuck in immature fantasies the woman tends to risk ending up in a worse position.

Thank you! This is a much better statement of the position I was trying to put forward. The man might disrespect other people, but he won't take any shit; it might be bad, in the sense that he's being horrible to people, but it won't be personally damaging to him, just the people he hurts as he cuts a swathe through life.

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http://orionsnebula.blogspot.com/

at 18:56 on 2009-12-21Melissa,

I appreciate all the disclaimers, I really do; I'm not accusing you of having your heart in the wrong place or wishing ill on anyone in the kink community.

I *think* we have a basic disagreement about childhood and adolescence, and the role sex, litereature, or sex literature plays in them.

I don't understand, for instance, why you would consider teen-targeted erotica, for instance, to be a squick; I think if written by someone other than Stephanie Myers it has the possibility to do a lot of good.

I can't point to a specific proposal you make about childrearing that I would object to--talking with kids about problematic movies, saying they should be free to explore their sexuality, and so on are all things I want to hear. But, probably because this started as a critique of a book, not a manifesto for youth education, I don't feel I have a coherent picture of how you think kids should interact with books. To be honest, what you've said still seems to me to be contradictory.

For example, you've said that teenagers should be free to explore sexuality through literature, but that writing erotica specifically for teenagers squicks you; to me, those positions aren't fully compatible. I don't know how it can be wrong to sell someone something it's okay for them to buy; for every market of readers there's a genre produced to meet their expectations. And honestly, I think a conscientious YA-targeted erotica writer could produce stuff that was better for kids than adult-targeted erotica which would naturally be about a different set of concerns.

Basically there's nothing more I can say at this point; some of your comments seem to have implications that trouble me, but I can't articulate the problem without putting words in your mouth. And it's difficult to get at the distinction I'm seeing between our stances on what's appropriate for teenagers without lapsing into scoring points by calling someone a prude.

In conclusion, I think I've said all I have to say about Twilight. I think there's room for an interesting conversation to be had about children and fiction in general, but that wasn't what the article was about. If you should choose at some point to explain in detail how you think children should approach fiction and what you think is acceptable to market to them, I'd read it with great interest.

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http://baihehua.livejournal.com/

at 18:56 on 2009-12-21Wow; long and meandering discussion.

I don't see anyone stating here that Twilight is a wonderful work of literature. There seems to be a consensus that Bella and Edward's relationship is not healthy. (If you want to view it as a BDSM relationship, I think that's fine, and there is certainly nothing wrong with BDSM in real life- with safewords and such-, but Bella and Edward's relationship as presented in the book does not seem healthy.)

I think one of the main problems (if not THE main problem) is the fact that this story is targeted to children- specifically prepubescent and pubescent girls. Girls are already being bombarded with social pressures to be meek, submissive, "feminine", etc; Meyer's work is certainly far from unique in this respect*. But Twilight is new, extremely popular, and sends this type of disempowering message in a very clear way. (This message, of course, is that it is perfectly acceptable for girls to wait for a man to protect them and make decisions for them.) Girls do not need any more messages to be docile little doormats, especially not from such popular sources.

The thing that I think most separates adult audiences from teen and preteen ones is that teens and children are still developing their opinions and beliefs about the world and themselves (discussed in many developmental analysis books). Whereas an adult can look at a character like Edward and think "he's hot/cute/sexy/such a bad boy, but I wouldn't want a boyfriend like him in real life", children and even many teens have a lot more trouble with that (not necessarily that they can't, but it's certainly harder). What the adult is doing there is interjecting his/her own outside beliefs ("I don't want a boyfriend like that"/"it's not okay for someone to act like that in real life") onto their understanding of this story. And that's great. But since children and many teens are still developing their beliefs, it is incredibly difficult for them to take still-forming opinions and contradict what the text seems to be saying. Twilight (or other materials) is much more likely to help *form* teens' beliefs about the world than it is to form adults'.

And that, I think, is the real problem. No one (that I know of, anyway) wants teens or children to emulate Bella's behavior (or Edward's, for that matter). But since teens and preteens are still developing their views of the world and themselves, they are much more likely to emulate or idolize these behaviors than adult readers would be.

As a result, I think authors of materials aimed at younger audiences need to be especially careful of negative messages their works may advocate. I'm sure most of these messages are completely unintentional, but authors (as responsible people) should try to be as aware as possible of what their material may be saying.

*I realize that these social messages are not as strong as they used to be, but they (like so many negative elements of society) are far from gone.

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Melissa G.

at 19:08 on 2009-12-21

I don't understand, for instance, why you would consider teen-targeted erotica, for instance, to be a squick;

Maybe we're defining erotica differently? In my mind erotica = a book written for the specific purpose of titillating and sexually arousing it's audience with sexually provocative scenes. Such as the book in Kyra's

latest review

. I don't think there's anything wrong with having sex scenes in teen books; if well written, they could be very beneficial. What bothers me is the idea of an adult writing a book whose *sole intent* is to try and sexually arouse teenagers. To me, that's squicky. It just is; I can't help it.

I think there's room for an interesting conversation to be had about children and fiction in general, but that wasn't what the article was about.

Yes, precisely. So while I am of course happy to discuss psychological/sociological issues with anyone, this really isn't the place for it. So I'd agree it's best to put the convo to rest.

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Arthur B

at 19:17 on 2009-12-21

I don't think there's anything wrong with having sex scenes in teen books; if well written, they could be very beneficial. What bothers me is the idea of an adult writing a book whose *sole intent* is to try and sexually arouse teenagers. To me, that's squicky. It just is; I can't help it.

I can see that. Adults writing books addressed to other adults with the intent of titillating or arousing them, and teenagers happening to chance across those books and enjoying them is one thing. Adults attempting to engage with the sexuality of teenagers on the level of titillation or arousal? Uh, not keen.

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http://orionsnebula.blogspot.com/

at 19:32 on 2009-12-21Arthur,

I couldn't agree less. Teenage sexuality is different from adult sexuality. Many can and will get something out of adult erotica, but teenagers as a group have different concerns and will find slightly different things appealing.

The most interesting part of Ms. Whitfield's article was the idea that Twilight and Flowers in the Attic embody a specifically *virginal* sexuality and that part of the challenge of writing sex scenes for kids is that many of them aren't familiar with the sensations of genital sex. The bruises and strained muscles and so on that Bella incurs when they do get down to banging, for instance, add a sensory dimension that kids will be familiar with.

So I do think that erotica for teenagers should be different from erotica for adults; plenty of teenagers seems to agree, choosing to participate in "lemon" fanfic communities rather than read mainstream erotica. But teen-for-teen erotica writers just produce an echo chamber where sexual ignorance and prejudices are amplified. And writing well is a skill developed over *years*.

Very few teenagers, in my opinion, are capable of producing honest, readable teen-targeted erotica; that's something that has to be left to adults with the perspective of age.

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Andy G

at 19:39 on 2009-12-21@ Arthur and Orionsnebula: I kind of agree with Orionsnebula here, I think in principle it's not really that different from the way the adult writers of something like Skins are tapping into teen fantasies. Adults writing erotica for teens is not in the same category as adults making sexual advances to teens, if that was an aspect you weren't keen on (though I may be putting words into your mouth there), any more than adults writing erotica for adults are doing so to their readers.

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http://orionsnebula.blogspot.com/

at 19:46 on 2009-12-21My name is Orion, by the way; My (defunct) blog was a joke on my name

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Arthur B

at 19:55 on 2009-12-21

Adults writing erotica for teens is not in the same category as adults making sexual advances to teens, if that was an aspect you weren't keen on (though I may be putting words into your mouth there), any more than adults writing erotica for adults are doing so to their readers.

You see, to me there's a difference between fiction with a heavily sexualised element which may titillate but doesn't have titillation as its main purpose (such as Skins, to use your example) and erotica, wherein sexual titillation is pretty much the entire purpose of the proceedings and any additional meaning is pretty much secondary.

I have never seen an example of an adult writing the latter for teenagers; I think it's the sort of thing that teenagers are better off exploring with other teenagers (such as on the lemon fic communities Orionsnebula refers to). I am unsure whether you could successfully pull it off without coming off as deeply creepy. I would love to hear about any counter-examples.

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Arthur B

at 19:59 on 2009-12-21(Though I want to stress that I don't think that intelligent, meaningful erotica is impossible - just that I would only classify as "erotica" fiction where the main purpose is titillation. Additional meaning can, and doubtless does, arise as an adjunct to this, but if the main purpose of the story isn't the arousal of the reader, what's the difference between erotica and normal fiction which includes sex scenes?)

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Robinson L

at 20:30 on 2009-12-21All right! I've been looking forward to this. Ptolemaues has been ranting about this series for over two years, and though I've never read any of it myself, I've picked up quite a lot second-hand from her and her fellow haters; and all this matches up pretty well with what I've gathered elsewhere.

She also

made a start

on

New Moon

, but she hasn't looked at it in months. (Unfortunate, as I enjoy her rants tremendously, but on the other hand I guess exposing herself to that stuff must be toxic to her health.) She also takes issue with Bella's treatment of Jessica, among other things.

[Bella} seems to have a bad enough relationship with her father that she calls him by his first name

Not sure about this; two of ptolemaeus' best friends call their fathers by their first names, and I don't think it's indicative of a bad relationship in either case. Then again, I presume Meyer never bothers to explain why Bella calls her father by his first name.

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http://ninjacatman.livejournal.com/

at 20:36 on 2009-12-21

[Bella} seems to have a bad enough relationship with her father that she calls him by his first name

From what I remember about the book (it's been a while) the way this is introduced it is meant to imply that Bella doesn't have a close relationship with her father.

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Melissa G.

at 20:51 on 2009-12-21

Not sure about this; two of ptolemaeus' best friends call their fathers by their first names, and I don't think it's indicative of a bad relationship in either case.

I feel like there was something in the book that hinted at this, but I don't have it in front of me to find out for sure. I remember distinctly being given the impression that she didn't get along with her father, and she does state that he doesn't like her calling him "Charlie". She says she can't do it in front of him. That to me is different from a consensual attitude toward it.

You see, to me there's a difference between fiction with a heavily sexualised element which may titillate but doesn't have titillation as its main purpose (such as Skins, to use your example) and erotica, wherein sexual titillation is pretty much the entire purpose of the proceedings and any additional meaning is pretty much secondary.

This was pretty much what I was getting at. The goal of erotica is not to "inform" (for lack of a better word), it's meant to "arouse". I think a teen fiction book that deals heavily with teenage sexuality as a theme and thus has a lot of sex scenes (which teens may or may not find titillating) is one thing and writing erotica for teens is another. The former is an exploratory look at sex between teens paying careful attention to what it's doing.

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Melissa G.

at 21:03 on 2009-12-21@Robinson L.:

Thanks for the link to your sister's lj entry! I got a kick out of that!

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Andy G

at 00:41 on 2009-12-22

I have never seen an example of an adult writing the latter for teenagers; I think it's the sort of thing that teenagers are better off exploring with other teenagers (such as on the lemon fic communities Orionsnebula refers to). I am unsure whether you could successfully pull it off without coming off as deeply creepy. I would love to hear about any counter-examples.

I know nothing about erotic fiction, my response was more to try and tease out if "creepiness" was the problem you were getting at, as I think it is an interesting question whether it would necessarily be an issue. Not an interesting question to which I have an answer however.

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Arthur B

at 01:35 on 2009-12-22Yes; I'm not satisfied that the best problem I can come up with in terms of adults writing out-and-out erotica for teens is "creepiness" - it's a bit Daily Mail isn't it? - which is why I would genuinely welcome anyone pointing out genuine examples of adults trying to write fiction which is primarily intended to arouse teenagers through the portrayal of sexual situations so we can have some data points.

I mean, you could make an argument for Twilight. But there's two issues there: firstly, Twilight is terrified of sex, to the extent that it is symbolised in the stories by sacrifice, bleeding, and undeath, which is pretty fatal for erotica (which requires a certain amount of sexual hoopla to really qualify as erotica in the first plaxce), but works far better for romance (the pursuit of innocence, the deflowering a culmination of the relationship developed throughout the story, etc.), which is a pretty big indication that Twilight falls on the "romance" side of the border. And also, Twilight creeps me the hell out, so it's not likely to change my mind on the erotica-for-teens concept. ;)

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http://orionsnebula.blogspot.com/

at 02:16 on 2009-12-22I don't actually read much erotica, so i can't think of any targeted to teenagers. I have to admit, I just always assumed it must exist.

The closest I come is fantasy writers like Melanie Rawn and Mercedes Lackey. None of her books are *strictly* about sex, but in several of the YA books (cough*ArrowsFlight*cough) the sex gets a huge chunk of the page count and is substantially more interesting than the main plot.

But if you'll gant the following premises:

1: It's okay for teens to read erotica

2: any two demographic groups will have different tastes as a matter of statistics

and

3: good writers are generally adults

it seems to follow that among the erotic stories it is possible to write, some will appeal more to teens, other to adults, and that the best of those stories will probably be written by adults, not children.

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Robinson L

at 03:00 on 2009-12-22

Thanks for the link to your sister's lj entry! I got a kick out of that!

Glad to hear it! Thought you might!

If you really liked it, I'm sure she'd appreciate comments. (Which you should be able to do anonymously if you don't already have an account.)

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Melissa G.

at 03:18 on 2009-12-22

If you really liked it, I'm sure she'd appreciate comments.

I was going to, but when I realized how long ago the entry was from, I thought it'd be weird so I didn't. ^_^;

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http://ninjacatman.livejournal.com/

at 03:43 on 2009-12-22

The closest I come is fantasy writers like Melanie Rawn and Mercedes Lackey. None of her books are *strictly* about sex, but in several of the YA books (cough*ArrowsFlight*cough) the sex gets a huge chunk of the page count and is substantially more interesting than the main plot.

But see that means it's not erotica, even if there is a lot of sex it's not just about the sex (whether the main plot is more interesting or not). Even trashy Harlequinn romances aren't erotica, they're trashy romances which have a lot of sex in them but are technically about the relationship with sex as a bonus. Erotica is the other way around.

One of the problems I think Melissa and Arthur and even me are having is when we think of erotica we think of the erotica we have come across which is written by adults with a distinctly adult view of sex. I can't think of erotica that has been written for teens with a distinctly teenage mindset. But that I'm thinking about, it doesn't like a bad idea, to write books about having sex from an actual teenage point of view.

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http://ninjacatman.livejournal.com/

at 03:44 on 2009-12-22***But now that I'm thinking about, it doesn't seem like a bad idea, to write books about having sex from an actual teenage point of view.***

because sometimes I skip important words when i type.

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Robinson L

at 15:30 on 2009-12-22

If you really liked it, I'm sure she'd appreciate comments. I was going to, but when I realized how long ago the entry was from, I thought it'd be weird so I didn't. ^_^;

Yeah, I know the feeling. Still, even if it is extremely belated, I think she'd appreciate feedback from someone who isn't a member of her family. Besides, she's probably either reading this already or will be soon enough, so it's not as if it would be out-of-the-blue.

Still up to you, of course. *shrugs*

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http://mary-j-59.livejournal.com/

at 16:04 on 2009-12-22I don't really have a lot to say here. I did read the series, and pretty much enjoyed the first three books, though they are certainly not great literature and I ended up raising my eyebrows in certain places. But I enjoyed this even more:

http://stoney321.livejournal.com/317176.html

Seriously, Sparkledammerung will tell you all you ever need to know about what "Twilight" is *really* about - and it's a hoot, besides.

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Melissa G.

at 16:32 on 2009-12-22@Mary J

Thanks for the link! I knew there was a Mormon influence in the book but I don't know enough about the religion to feel able to discuss it myself. So this was really interesting for me to read! I liked her picture inclusions too. ^^

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Arthur B

at 16:47 on 2009-12-22A note: this year we've had:

- This article.

- My review of

Vampire: the Masquerade - Bloodlines

.

- Dan's article about

the philosophy of identity

, which included notes on the metaphysical underpinnings of vampirism in the

Buffy

setting.

- My review of

Let the Right One In

.

- And Kyra's first article of the year was another

Twilight article

.

Have we just accidentally had our very own Year of the Vampire? Is it time for a vampire theme? (Or perhaps an expansion of the zombies theme to include undeath in general?) Should we put a moratorium on further Twilight articles so that it never, ever, ever qualifies for a theme?

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Sister Magpie

at 18:52 on 2009-12-22What, no True Blood?

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Arthur B

at 19:01 on 2009-12-22The search feature's showing some mention in the PlayPen, but no articles. I don't remember wrong, but I might just be being forgetful...

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Shim

at 19:42 on 2009-12-22Wow, I'm late... I have also not read this book. Oh well... I feel like for this discussion, the "boys' trash" (basically) mentioned is a bit different from

Twilight

, whatever you think about quality or empowerment. It's about the type of characters these people are supposed to be.

James Bond, Rambo, Conan... they are basically military types with very unusual lives, and the books/films are about the way they defeat obstacles and kick ass. Boys certainly tend to think what they do is cool, but they're so far removed from typical lives that there's not much direct parallel in terms of how to behave. Of course, they all glamorise violence and relentless enmity as ways to deal with problems. One might argue that the contexts are all military ones and a bit different to everyday problems, which might reduce the effect, but I think it's there. I'd say the typical influence is to make boys want to be strong, hardy, resolute, and maybe suave. On the whole, I think there won't be many situations where boys could think "oh, this is just like what happened to Conan" and approach or interpret situations in a similar way.

Twilight

is all about vampires and magic, but the heroine is supposedly fairly ordinary, and designed for girls to empathise with. She does normal stuff. Relationships with people are the core of the book, from what I gather (like, it being a romance). That being the case, stripped-down versions of some situations in the book could happen to real girls - getting followed around, having their boundaries pushed by boys, having the pace of relationships controlled by boys, and... whatever else happens in the book I haven't read. So it's

perhaps

more likely that the portrayal of Bella and the relationship, which is supposedly ideal, will influence girls' approach to similar situations in their own lives.

To some extent I might also say that James Bond, Rambo et al. aren't really held up as role models. Few people (some, but few) would say James Bond is a model for relationships with others - he doesn't seem to have friends, is egotistical, throws himself into danger unnecessarily, is incredibly cynical... And while his string of girls might appeal at first, boys don't only want sex. But also, these heroes only show the characteristics they do because of their extraordinary lives. If Conan settled down as a shepherd somewhere and found a girlfriend, I've no idea what he'd be like, because you don't usually find out much about their real selves, only the traits relevant to adventures. Bond would probably be that self-important git in the office who seems to have a new girlfriend every week and a whole string of enemies at work and outside.

Sorry, that rambles a bit but I hope it makes sense.

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Robinson L

at 20:02 on 2009-12-22

What, no True Blood?

Not yet. Once I've read

Dead to the World

I intend to begin work on a review of the book series (which, at my speed, should be ready sometime in March), but I've yet to see even one episode of the tv show, and I haven't seen anybody else tackle it here yet.

I agree with Arthur's suggestion of including a theme handle which includes "Vampires." I'd personally favor a new handle, given the large backlog of articles in our archives, it seems to me more differentiation among them would be all to the good.

Oh, and Melissa, congratulations on getting into the top five most-discussed articles.

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Melissa G.

at 20:20 on 2009-12-22

What, no True Blood?

I've seen the show, and while I didn't *love* it, I didn't hate it either. I'm basically too indifferent to invest my time in an article personally. :-) But I'm looking forward to reading a review of the book series if it appears here on FB. I'm curious how it will compare to the show.

Oh, and Melissa, congratulations on getting into the top five most-discussed articles.

Thanks! I'm very excited about that! ^_^

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Sister Magpie

at 20:30 on 2009-12-22Heh--I'm not really missing the True Blood articles. It just seemed like it went with the theme. I've never read the books, but like the TV series. I started out thinking it was just too silly for words, but was somehow looking forward to it every week so I have to admit I'm a fan.

On the subject of vampires that aren't vampires, I really wanted to agree with this article, actually. Of course anybody can take out certain details and still have the character be a vampire (even something so big as "can go out in the sun") but the problem with so many modern vampire stories is they so often want to have the cool parts without any of the sacrifice that's supposed to make it horrible. This goes double if the person isn't even particularly doing anything wrong.

I always remember someone--I think it was Cassie Claire, actually, criticizing Moonlight for that reason and saying that if you wanted a vampire story you'd be better off watching Dexter, since he's pretty much a vampire despite not actually being a vampire. Just because he's a monster who preys on humans while looking like one of them, and he has a hunger for blood he can't deny.

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Arthur B

at 20:48 on 2009-12-22I think also there's an certain extent to which, if you want to tap into the old vampire myths, you have to include at least a tiny amount of the trappings which go with them, if only on an allegorical level (as with Dexter), otherwise you're trying to freeride on the reputation of vampires without really developing a proper connection to the myth.

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Shim

at 21:13 on 2009-12-22Well, vampires nowadays tend to ignore the inconvenient mythological basis of being, y'know,

actually, genuinely dead

. And depending on your myth of choice, repulsive. And not necessarily having human motivations any more. Obviously it all depends a bit where you decide your vampires are "rooted" - the folk versions (from my reading a long time ago) seemed a lot more monstrous undead horror, without the personality of Dracula or whoever.

I note that they don't seem to turn ordinary people into corrupted semi-human serfs any more, either. Now that might be an interesting twist for Twilight's take on relationships...

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Melissa G.

at 21:49 on 2009-12-22

I have to admit I'm a fan

I also find True Blood very addictive. ^^ Even though Bill is a bit of a "pussy-vampire", we also get Eric who is an old-school sadistic freak vampire, which makes me really happy. I loved when he got blood in his hair and had to cut it!

And depending on your myth of choice, repulsive.

I think Anne Rice had a lot to do with making vampires hot. :-)

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Andy G

at 22:04 on 2009-12-22On the year of the Vampire front, did anyone see Thirst? I thought that was great. And definitely didn't cut back on the nastier side of the vampire myth.

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Sister Magpie

at 01:17 on 2009-12-23Thirst, the Australian film from years ago?

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Andy G

at 02:08 on 2009-12-23No, the Korean film from this year by Chan-woon Park.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0762073/

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Sister Magpie

at 02:40 on 2009-12-23I haven't seen it. I must remember to check it out--if it's good. Is it good?

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Melissa G.

at 02:49 on 2009-12-23

I must remember to check it out--if it's good.

Ditto! It sounds really intriguing. And I've heard good things about Korean horror in general (assuming it falls into that category).

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Andy G

at 10:32 on 2009-12-23Personally I loved it. There are some awesome trailers for it around too:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODoagpV68gA

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http://orionsnebula.blogspot.com/

at 18:04 on 2009-12-23Again, I'd blame Bram Stoker for this stuff before I'd blame Anne Rice.

We don't know the story with titular lead, but Dracula-vampires explicitly don't have to be "already dead". At least, Mina Harker gets to turn halfway and get vampire powers while she's still alive.

Furthermore, Dracula can and does go out during the day, not once but twice. First Jonathan runs into him in the streets of London, then when they attack him in his coffin during the day, he escapes and runs out into the streets. While in the sun, he can't use any of his magic powers, but suffers no harm.

Honestly, Bram Stoker decided that vampires were going to be about sex--which worked as horror in Victorian England. But as our culture gets a little more honest and open about sexuality, sex-vampires become less scary and more tittilating.

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Melissa G.

at 19:38 on 2009-12-23

Again, I'd blame Bram Stoker for this stuff before I'd blame Anne Rice.

I certainly wouldn't. Bram Stoker's Dracula (and I'm speaking specifically to the book not any of the movies based on it) is not supposed to be sexy. His physical description (what little there is of it) is not overly flattering. We're not meant to think that Mina is drawn to him because she is physically attracted to him; she isn't. She's drawn to his animal sexual magnetism, or through his powers of mind control.

In Dracula, the sun isn't fatal to the Count, but it does render him powerless. This forces him to adjust his daily life to sleeping during the day (in his coffin filled with dirt) and going out at night when he is powerful. The important thing is that "the sun is a curse to vampires". While it doesn't necessarily have to kill them (Supernatural is a good example of when it worked for me that the sun wasn't fatal), it should be detrimental to them in some way. Causing them to sparkle really isn't a detriment in any way, shape, or form. And that's the problem with the Twilight vampires.

And Mina certainly doesn't gain vampire powers in the book, nor does Lucy. They just waste away in illness as they lose more and more blood. Dracula does give Mina his blood to turn her, but she won't become a vampire until her death when she rises up out of her coffin as Lucy tried to do. Towards the end, she starts to have a sort of psychic connection to Dracula himself, but I wouldn't call that "vampire powers". Dracula has linked himself to her through his blood and she is using that link against him.

The thing to remember about the difference between Anne Rice's work and Bram Stoker's is that Stoker's was condemning sex. Don't give in to your dark sexual urges, it will make you a monster. It's true that nowadays, this message seems more titillating in nature than scary, but that's hardly Stoker's fault.

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Jamie Johnston

at 16:15 on 2009-12-29Hello folks! Been away. Interesting article & discussion. I confess I've slightly skimmed the discussion so forgive me if I say things that have already been mentioned.

The part of the discussion about sex made me think of one of the things that I've found difficult to untangle in my head about the

Twilight

books. At first I thought Meyer's approach to the 'vampirism as metaphor for sex' thing was interesting and quite clever. As Orion has pointed out a couple of comments above this one, having that metaphor made sense in Stoker's time [disclaimer: haven't actually read

Dracula

, except an abridged & simplified children's version when I was under 10] as a way of (first of all) representing sex in fiction at all and (secondly) representing sex as something both attractive and dangerous. Now that sex isn't, by and large, seen as dangerous, the modern vampire story has to find a social setting in which it still makes sense to address sex as something that's dangerous as well as appealing. One option is to use it to address rape-fantasies through 'vampirism as metaphor for non-consensual-or-is-it? sex', but another is Meyer's social setting of teenage sex, which has elements of dangerousness in that it may attract parental and social disapproval, it may be new and unknown, and it may bring the real (because of ignorance or nonchalance on the teenagers' part about safe sex) or imagined (because of ignorance about the biology of conception and transmission of disease) threat of pregnancy and / or STDs. For a lot of young teenagers, especially ones from small and conservative communities and especially for girls, sex must in some ways be quite a scary prospect. I'm sure Meyer isn't by any means the first artist to see and exploit the potential for vampire stories as metaphors for all this, but

Twilight

was the first place I'd encountered it.

What I find hard to get my head around, though, is that she also, especially after the first book, brings sex very much into the story on a non-metaphorical level. Sometimes the metaphor and the literal story are saying the same thing about sex and sometimes they say different things, so it becomes a little confusing. For example, Edward refuses to 'have sex with' (i.e. bite) Bella because it would be selfish and would deprive her of her carefree innocence and would imperil her soul; yet he refuses to (literally) have sex with her for simply because it would be physically dangerous and probably kill her. Both lines of reasoning are disempowering for Bella and both are based on the Nice Guy premise that Bella probably wouldn't really enjoy it; but the metaphorical reasons are moral ones and the literal ones are entirely practical. Is Meyer telling us that teenagers shouldn't have sex because it's metaphorically but not actually wrong and also because it's literally but not metaphorically dangerous?

And then it's further confused by an extra layer of metaphor, because having literal sex with a vampire is, like literal (and irresponsible and ill-informed) teenage human sex, dangerous, but for different reasons: vampire sex is dangerous because in the excitement the vampire is likely to lose self-control and bite you (or, as it becomes in the later books, because the vampire is so super-strong that even if he doesn't bite you the mere exertion of force that's involved in the sex itself is likely to kill you). Which appears in at least some parts of the series to operate as a metaphor for the actual dangers of teenage sex to the extent that sex with Edward is something Bella both desires and fears (thus her mental disposition parallels what many of Meyer's female readers probably feel or felt when contemplating havign sex for the first time), except that the metaphor in this case is an extremely bad and misleading one because, first of all, fear of sex with a vampire is extremely rational and appropriate because having sex with a vampire genuinely is almost certain to kill you whereas fear of sex with a teenage boy is largely irrational and socially constructed because having sex with a teenage boy is almost certain not to kill you and very likely to cause you no ill effects at all; and secondly, the danger from sex with a vampire stems from the vampire's inherent dangerousness and lack of self-control, whereas the danger from sex with a teenage boy, in as much as there is any danger at all, stems from irresponsibility and ignorance on the part of both participants. So on this level vampire sex seems to function as a metaphor for teenage human sex that tells us, quite unhelpfully, that teenage human sex is extremely dangerous because boys are violent and have little self-control. Indeed sex with a vampire here seems to be really a metaphor for sex with a date-rapist, but because it looks like a metaphor for sex in general the reader comes away with an unconscious impression that all men are rapists. Which is, to put it very mildly, not an appropriate assertion to make by sleight-of-hand in a book like this.

And not only do the metaphorical and the literal messages get into conflicts and tangles with one another, but the metaphorical and literal events themselves get caught up together in the plot. In

Breaking dawn

(

spoilers

, as if anyone cares!) Edward does eventually have sex (literally) with Bella, she having tricked / persuaded him to do this while she's still human. The metaphorical danger of the literal sex doesn't materialize: he restrains himself sufficiently that he causes no injury beyond extensive bruising. But then we find that the literal danger of literal sex does result: Bella gets pregnant. Consequently, although the literal sex didn't result in the expected metaphorical event (death), this result is ultimately caused by the literal result of the literal sex (pregnancy), because Bella dies delivering the baby, thus in turn bringing about the metaphorical sex (vampirism) because in order to save her Edward has to make her a vampire, except that this has now stopped being a metaphor for sex and has become something like a metaphor for the immortal soul (since Bella, like a good Mormon, refuses life-saving abortion and therefore dies to be reborn as a happy immortal being).

It's all rather baffling, really.

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Jamie Johnston

at 16:34 on 2009-12-29Oh, also, quick thing about empowerment. I think this is a little more complex than some commenters have thought, in as much as Bella is actually quite a powerful agent of action in the plot a lot of the time but at the same time she's very disempowered in other ways. In

Twilight

itself (

spoliers

of course) she has a lot of will but very little capacity and does indeed have to be rescued again and again. It's perhaps slightly good that the climax results from her choice to escape the protection of the Cullens in order to rescue her mother from the evil vampire, but this is undermined by the fact that it's a stupid idea and she ends up having to be rescued from the evil vampire herself.

But in the later books things improve a bit. In

New moon

a certain amount of rescuing is still required, but she does end up taking a real role in the final bit of the plot, namely 'rescuing' Edward from killing himself because he thinks she's dead. In

Eclipse

she exercises a fairly significant bit of agency in choosing between her two suitors. And of course in

Breaking dawn

she gets ridiculous super-powers and can kick everyone's collective arse. In a sense her ridiculous super-powers are quite traditionally feminine in that they're protective rather than offensive, but there's no implication that they're anything other than utterly crucial to victory.

Still, the series is really a lurve story more than a fantasy adventure, so the most important place for Bella to show agency and empowerment is in her relationship with Edward, and there isn't much of it there. She's pushy about sex and eventually gets what she wants, but one can't really say that she's in control or that she directs events in the relationship.

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http://atropaxbeladona.livejournal.com/

at 22:48 on 2011-02-10I can't comment on the original post, but I read your dumb post about Steve Vander Ark and laughed so hard your cluelessness, I thought you should know. Also, some facts about the case can be found

here

and

here

.

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http://atropaxbeladona.livejournal.com/

at 22:48 on 2011-02-10Oops, it should be AT your cluelesness but my browser eated it. :(

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Dan H

at 23:20 on 2011-02-10Hiya, sorry you can't post on the original article, really not sure what the issue is if you can post on this one (openID sometimes plays funny).

I'm more than willing to believe that the HP Lexicon did in fact contain unattributed material from the Potter books (and looking at the article which I believe I wrote in 2008 I did in fact open with the line "If the guy has genuinely reproduced text from the Potter books without attribution, then he's breaking the law and he needs to correct that") it's just that Rowling seemed to be trying to argue that (a) reference guides were inherently worthless and that (b) a guide to her books could be improved by including information that is not in the books.

I don't really give a crap about the legality of it (that's for courts to decide, although personally I come down on the side of "if it's not her words it's not her copyright" although I suspect that is an oversimplification) what bothered me was what it implied about Rowling's attitude to her texts.

But dude, it was three years ago, I'm personally kind of over it.

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Dan H

at 09:39 on 2011-02-11Further:

Having read the posts you linked in some detail, I'm pretty sure the court's analysis and understanding of copyright law was basically in line with my own as expressed in the original article.

My problem with the lawsuit wasn't that I thought that Rowling was necessarily wrong, just that I thought she was acting for the wrong reasons. Her objection to the lexicon was that it just put information from the books in alphabetical order and that's ... well ... perfectly reasonable as far as I can see.

The key to the case was (as I pointed out several times in the comments on the original article) that copyright protects not ideas but expressions, and the Lexicon used too much of Rowling's original expression (particularly from the two companion books). It had nothing to do with those complaints which I dismissed as ludicrous - that there wasn't enough new information in the book, and that all he'd done was rearrange preexisting information.

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Arthur B

at 11:00 on 2011-02-11It's often the case in law - especially poorly understood fields like IP law - that the reasons your client has to want to take action against someone have nothing to do with the actual legal arguments as to why what that person did was wrong. I imagine her lawyers spent a lot of time encouraging her to stick to the actual harm that was done - the wholesale borrowing of her text - rather than wittering on about irrelevant nonsense that undermined her case, and failing that tried to suppress the urge to roll their eyes at her testimony and did all they could to get her off the stand sharpish before she did more damage.

A lot of the skill in being an attorney, especially in emotive cases like these, is taking a client's irrational concerns, working out whether there's any legal merit to them, and failing that working out whether the opponent has screwed up in some other respect which would allow your client to get satisfaction that way. It's difficult because often the sensible and prudent thing to do is not the thing which would make the client feel happy and vindicated.

On the other side, I would

hope

Vander Ark's lawyers expended at least some effort to say "Look, we might be able to put together a case here, but let's face it - it'll be tenuous. It might be cheaper and easier in the long run to cut your losses and do a rewrite to reduce the amount of stuff you're copy-pasting directly from the books so we can settle this out of court." If a client is intent on making a stand and won't listen to advice to the contrary that's one thing, but it's not cool to let clients walk into the lion's den expecting kittens.

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Gamer_2k4 at 19:36 on 2011-05-18

Meyer wrote a prologue about an imminent death in first person past tense. Say that with me again. IMMINENT death. FIRST person. PAST tense.

So? I'm sure nearly all first-person works are written in past tense; I know for sure that most novels in general are past tense. Present tense just sounds strange in a book, regardless of the application. After all, the fact that you have a book in its entirety means it was (supposedly) compiled together from past events, rather than being something that's being written as you read it.

Now, I'm not trying to say that Meyer has any merit as a writer. That would be silly. However, past tense isn't as bad as you're making it out to be.

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Wardog

at 20:13 on 2011-05-18Meyer's prologue, and pedestrian prose style, don't bother me as much as they bother Melissa but nevertheless I do agree that trying to induce a sense of narrative tension by having the narrator fearing her imminent death in the past tense only draws attention to the artificiality of the form because it smacks you in the face with the reality that this is being narrated from *somewhere*. I don't think it's the first person past tense that's the issue: it's the death thang. Also quite a lot of YA novels, The Hunger Games and The Knife of Never Letting Go, are told in present tense first person narration for precisely this reason.

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Melissa G.

at 22:59 on 2011-05-18

nevertheless I do agree that trying to induce a sense of narrative tension by having the narrator fearing her imminent death in the past tense only draws attention to the artificiality of the form because it smacks you in the face with the reality that this is being narrated from *somewhere*.

This basically says it. I wasn't objecting to the past tense. I think past tense should be the default if you don't have a good reason to switch it up. The problem with what Meyer did was that you have a character telling you how they are about to die despite the fact that since the narration is in past tense, we already KNOW the narrator doesn't die thus killing any sense of tension or fear.

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Andy G

at 23:27 on 2011-05-18I remember writing about present tense narration in my first year at uni. There was a sentence in All Quiet on the Western Front that piqued my interest:

We trudge through mud for five days. (paraphrase)

The question is: at what point is he narrating from? If it's the middle of the period, how does he know they will marching for five days. If it's after the period, why doesn't he use past tense?

Don't get me wrong: I'm not saying present-tense narration is problematic or illogical or anything. I just think it's an interesting contrast to the past-tense first-person-about-to-die narration.

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http://ruderetum.blogspot.com/

at 08:42 on 2011-05-19It seems that if one wants tension in a past tense, using first persion might not be the way to go. Rather it is more effective if it is some version of the apersonal narrative voice.

Though that might not be as immersive. This isn't true in my personal experience, I often get annoyed with first person present tense even if it works on occasion.

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Wardog

at 10:33 on 2011-05-19Yes, I think you're right. I think the thing is you can't have it both ways. There's nothing inherently "wrong" about first person past tense narration telling you the protagonist presently fears for her death but you can't also expect the reader to get all wound up about it.

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Andy G

at 12:25 on 2011-05-19I've just remembered something that the Kick-Ass voiceover narrator says:

"And if you're reassuring yourself that I'm going to make it through this since I'm talking to you now, quit being such a smart-ass! Hell dude, you never seen "Sin City"? "Sunset Boulevard"? "American Beauty"?

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Dan H

at 23:02 on 2011-05-19I have heard that /Sunset Boulevard/ originally opened with the narrator actually checking himself into a morgue.

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Shim

at 23:22 on 2011-05-19

"We trudge through mud for five days." (paraphrase) The question is: at what point is he narrating from? If it's the middle of the period, how does he know they will marching for five days. If it's after the period, why doesn't he use past tense?

Well, I'd say not from any point, but the whole period. Or if you insist on a fixed point, continuously at points during the five days that are handily merged for the reader's convenience. But I prefer the first.

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Wardog

at 23:31 on 2011-05-19Also, and sorry to keep going on about this because I do absolutely see your point Andy, none of those texts are trying to make you feel anxious about whether or not the protagonist dies.

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Dan H

at 23:38 on 2011-05-19To be fair to Stephanie Meyer, you can make the case that the flash-forward in Twilight *also* isn't trying to make you feel anxious about whether or not the protagonist dies, rather it's trying to make you feel curious about how this seemingly normal girl will find herself at risk of death (spoiler: the guy she likes turns out to be a vampire).

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Wardog

at 23:44 on 2011-05-19Point taken. I am pwned.

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Melissa G.

at 00:35 on 2011-05-20

To be fair to Stephanie Meyer, you can make the case that the flash-forward in Twilight *also* isn't trying to make you feel anxious about whether or not the protagonist dies, rather it's trying to make you feel curious about how this seemingly normal girl will find herself at risk of death (spoiler: the guy she likes turns out to be a vampire).

The point remains that it didn't make me feel *anything* because the prose was flat, explanatory, bland, and horribly horribly boring. It inspired no feeling whatsoever. The first person narrator was facing her death and she was waxing boring about trivial details. The story could have just started with the first chapter, and the audience wouldn't have lost anything. It wasn't just the first person past tense fail of making the audience nervous or anxious. The passage was just poor and served no purpose and should have been cut completely. At least in Kick-Ass even though I wasn't thinking the kid would die, I was still nervous and freaked out for him because that movie inspired thoughts and feelings and connection to the main character and who he was and how he felt. Twilight does NONE of this with it's awkwardly phrased, thesaurus syndrome purple prose.

*pants* Wow, ranty. Sorry....

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http://ruderetum.blogspot.com/

at 11:36 on 2011-05-20It comes to mind that in first person past tense, the result of the situation might not be death, but it could be something traumatic or bad altogether. Examples: Robin Hobb's Farseer trilogy, Mika Waltari's The Egyptian.

This is not a defense of Waltari, I was just thinking how it could work as generating tension. Arguably this would apply to All Quiet on the Western Front, as even if we might not worry for the narrator, everyone knows its going to get bad. I don't recall whether the whole novel was in first person past tense though, rather than just the quote Andy G posted.

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http://ruderetum.blogspot.com/

at 11:49 on 2011-05-20I mean defense of Meyer. Drat.

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Melissa G.

at 17:34 on 2011-05-20

This is not a defense of Waltari, I was just thinking how it could work as generating tension.

I think it could work. If the narrative managed to invoke anxiety or fear or nerves for the character, that would be a successful passage despite the fact that the audience knows she won't die. Also, it's hard for the prologue to inspire anything in the reader because we don't know Bella yet, and we have yet to care about her. So it'd be more difficult to pull off in the first book then it would in the second or third where the character and our feelings toward them is already established. In any case, it would take a better writer than Meyer to pull it off.

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Andy G

at 11:31 on 2011-05-23"I don't recall whether the whole novel was in first person past tense though, rather than just the quote Andy G posted."

Just FYI, it was :)

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Andy G

at 11:31 on 2011-05-23Apart from the very, very end.

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Robinson L

at 22:30 on 2011-06-06More necroing. I'm not sure if this is bringing a new perspective on the above discussion of tension in first person narration, or reiterating a point someone else has already made; in first person, past-tense narration, I think when the protagonist is in danger, the tension comes more from how they'll get out of it, rather than whether they will (similarly in a great deal of third person narratives).

Brandon Sanderson hung a pretty funny lampshade on this point in the second book of his

Alcatraz

series, where the first person narrator encourages the reader to ignore the mortal danger he was in at the end of the previous chapter for a moment because he's narrating in the past tense, so he obviously survived somehow.

But anyway, this is all just a thinly disguised excuse to provide an update on my

earlier promise

to deliver an article on the subject of Charlaine Harris' Sookie Stackhouse/Southern Vampire series. I had one mostly worked out, then I read

Pyrofennec's review of All Together Dead

and I had to rethink my whole take on the series. So no articles any time soon.

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Wardog

at 16:46 on 2011-06-07Ye Gods, that's a lot of fail. I read about halfway through the first one, tbh, but the banal prose style sent me to sleep. I will confess to a secret filthy love of the TV series - even though it's, y'know, not without problems. Tara being one of them. I quite *like* Tara but I've never seen so many shitty things happen to one person in my entire life.

The line I particularly liked in there, and by 'liked' I mean made me cringe in an amusing fashion, was "racial blend." That, to me, sounds like a protein shake.

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Robinson L

at 00:00 on 2011-06-09I actually quite like the book series, for various reasons, but I obviously need to start thinking about it more critically.

I also enjoy

True Blood

, though as you say, it's got issues too. Despite the problems surrounding her character, Tara's actually my favorite in the tv show for the sheer awesomeness of her intro in episode one.

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TheMerryMustelid

at 15:41 on 2012-04-21It's probably been said before, but the only rational explanation that I can think of for the Twilight series being the success it was (even before the movies came out) was that desparate, coming-of-age Harry Potter fans needed something to replace their fantasy fix, and sadly Twilight was the wrong young adult series to come out at the right time.

Now that they're full grown adults, hopefully they're reading Game of Thrones to remind them what good fantasy writing is.

I enjoyed the Harry Potter series myself *ducks* but happily went on to Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials series which saved me from Twihard Disease.

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http://fishinginthemud.livejournal.com/

at 16:54 on 2012-04-21I can just about understand the appeal of

Twilight

to a teenager. Bella's life sucks exactly the way your life sucks. You have to do the dishes while your brothers sit on the couch watching tv and laughing at you for being a girl. You get in trouble for swearing when they don't. You're not allowed to play and have fun and have dreams and ambitions while they are. Boys at school are creepy douchebags to you, and your boyfriend is a total controlling asshole.

It might be nice to have that turned into something that's kind of not so bad, and affirms that you actually are okay, even kind of awesome, and boys treat you like crap because they can't handle your awesomeness, and anyway you wouldn't want them to be nice to you, because then they'd be spineless pussies. (How I hate that word.) Your dad makes you do the housework not because you're a girl and that's all you're good for, but because he loves you and cares about you and you have your role in life just as he has his. Your boyfriend wants to control you and protect you and make decisions for you because that's his role, just as it's your role to make him happy in exactly the way he chooses. Really, it's not so bad, and you don't have to feel so bad about it.

I think my heart just cracked a little.

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TheMerryMustelid

at 17:05 on 2012-04-22

I can just about understand the appeal of Twilight to a teenager...Boys at school are creepy douchebags to you, and your boyfriend is a total controlling asshole.

Massive massive massive massive spoilers for about 1/3 of the book. Also, as the title suggests, this article is about nasty things so don’t read if you’re likely to be upset

Preramble (like a preamble but … d’you see?)

This is a bleak day indeed. I just got my hands on a copy of Corambis, the much-anticipated (by me at least) concluding part to Sarah Monette’s Doctrine of Labyrinths quartet and the truth of it is, I don’t think I can finish it.

Oh, Sarah, what happened? I do still love you, I just don’t think it’s working out.

I think it’s partially problems associated with reading through a series over a lengthy period of time. When I read Melusine, The Virtu was already out in hardback and I tore through at them enthusiastically, so drawn into the world and the characters that I barely noticed they were so heavily saturated in angst and woe that one could drown in it by simply opening the book a little recklessly. There was a bit of a wait for The Mirador – which I seem to recall I felt slightly less positively about but still adored – and I fell upon Mehitabel Parr’s I’m sure welcoming bosom to save me from the tidal waves of A&W. As much as I love Felix and Mildmay, it was Mehitabel’s narrative voice that made The Mirador bearable for me. It was such a necessary contrast to the boys: someone with some redeeming sense of self-irony, hurrah!

Of course, Mehitabel isn’t in Corambis. And, God, I miss her. There is a new viewpoint character, Kay Brightmore, blinded and imprisoned and weighed down by the terrible military failure that kicks off the book. He’s basically lost everything that ever mattered to him, can no longer fight on account of being blind and, needless to say, he has angst out the wazoo about it. I was broken and crying by Chapter three.

And, quite frankly, I just can’t take it. I know there is redemption in the future of these characters (characters I really care about, having spent three books with them), I know there is self-actualisation and the potential for happiness, I know because I cheated and looked, but I’ve really really struggled with Corambis. The worst of it is, I’m sure it will be a triumphant and satisfying conclusion to the quartet. Sarah Monette is an excellent writer, I love her world, I love the way she uses language, I love her characters, I love everything about her but I think I’m going to have to accept the fact I simply can’t read her.

Oh, Sarah, what happened? I do still love you, it’s not you, it’s me.

Maybe in a couple of years we’ll be able to work something out.

I think circumstances might be playing into this unhappy state of affairs as well. When I read the early books, there wasn’t a cloud in my sky. But having emerged from a rather bleak year, there’s something a little too close in all that guilt and grief and self-loathing and despair, and I can’t distance myself enough from it to enjoy it. There is a systematic aestheticisation of suffering to be found in all of Monette’s books. I’m not going to try and argue that as either a positive or negative quality in her work. I think it’s probably neutral: it’s

something

art

does

sometimes

. I acknowledge the difference between literary suffering and real suffering, in that there can be a romance in the former which is impossible in the latter. Also literary suffering exists in a wider, symbolic and allegorical sphere than that of an individual having shitty things done to them by life or others, mainly, I suspect, because it’s not real. Take madness – there is something deeply attractive and romantic about the artistic representation of madness (like Felix’s madness in Melusine) and it’s perfectly possible to appreciate that, and to find in it a kind of beauty, without ignoring the genuine distress suffered by the mentally ill. In short, Ophelia is not my friend who killed herself last year.

But the boundaries between the fictional and the real are not comprehensively signposted. There isn’t a traceable spectrum between Lavinia, daughter of Titus Andronicus, and Elizabeth Short. And ultimately I think there comes an impossible point when the literary and the real collide, corrupt each other and prove they are utterly irreconcilable and yet simultaneously inseparable. Yes, they must be understood as different things operating in a different way – a painting of St Sebastian is not the same as footage of the prisoners at Guantanamo bay – but there comes a point when it is necessary to remember what it is that’s being aestheticised and ask yourself why.

Page 152

Okay, so, there’s a gang-rape scene in Corambis.

Felix – former prostitute, broken gay wizard with ex-cruel master and traumatic past - ends up subjecting himself a thaumaturgic orgy in order to earn money to pay for his ailing brother’s medicine.

It’s awful.

It’s not that it’s explicit, just awful.

And I’m no wuss, okay. I’ve read Last Exit to Brooklyn. I’ve read The Wasp Factory. I’ve read American Psycho.

But something about this scene in this book bought me a first class ticket on the ARGH! Train and whizzed me straight out of my comfort zone.

It’s strange to say that something is “outside your comfort zone” in that it feels like a confession of personal failure (also something that’s outside my comfort zone). And then I thought about it more, and I thought: hey, so what, gang-rape is outside my comfort zone. Surely that’s normal. Gang-rape is absolutely something that should be outside all our comfort zones. But here’s where it gets complicated: in fact, fictional gang-rape is not outside my comfort zone. I play H-games, for God’s sake, where they’re ten a penny. You can’t take two steps in an H-game without stubbing your toe on a gang rape. So it’s something more specific than that. It was something about this particular portrayal of it.

It’s not shock value. Felix gets himself sexually abused on a pretty regular basis, so much so, in fact, that it’s kind of part of the fun, and it’s very much tied into Monette’s aesthetic of suffering.

I could not see, and I could barely hear, save for my own harsh breathing. But I could feel. I could Malkar’s hands like silk, running up and down my back, tracing the scars, the old palimpsest of pain. I could feel his body arching against me, his bulk, his heat. I felt his hands slide under my hips, stroking, exciting, felt the stiffness of him against my thigh. Pain, then, but not too much. Pain … and arousal all woven together like a tapestry. I was moaning, gasping; the only word I could form were “Please, Malkar, please, lease,” and I didn’ tknow if I was begging him to stop or continue. Not that it would made the slightest difference either way.

Let’s pin our colours to the mast here. That’s beautiful. Terrible, but beautiful and absolutely literary in its unrealness. It’s also about as accurate a portrayal of sexual abuse than St Sebastian up there is of martyrdom. Perhaps I’m just an irredeemable sicko but I’m pretty sure it’s there, to an extent, to be enjoyed, partially as spectacle (straight women do not generally write about beautiful gay boys sexing each other manipulatively because it’s a Serious Social Issue) and, also, partially as vindication for all the crappy things that have been done to innumerable female characters in a seventy years of fantasy fiction. I’m not, of course, advocating backlash (more manrape!) but there is something compelling and, even perhaps comforting, in characters like Felix, Alec and friends, these beautiful men, who are as sexually vulnerable as women, suffer and fear the sort of things women suffer and fear, and are very much created to be subjects of an extra-textual female gaze and the intra-textual male gaze. I’m not saying that men don’t get raped and looked at, but the sheer saturation is demonstrably less. I am not trying to say that what happens to Felix at the start of Melusine isn’t dreadful. It is. But it’s a literary violation, and it reduces him to a literary madness that is as terrible and as beautiful as the horror that creates it.

But let’s talk about gang rape. Now there’s something you don’t say everyday.

The scene itself written in a very similar style – opulent, not too explicit although more explicit than above, and contains the same awkward issues of dubious consent. In Melusine, Felix chooses to go to Malkar in a fit of self loathing. In Corambis he agrees theoretically to an orgy in order to raise money for Mildmay’s medical treatment. In both cases what ends up happening to him is far more devastating than what he originally signed up for but, equally, there’s an element of complicity to it. If you return to your abusive master, expect to get abused. If you agree to be the centerpiece of an orgy, expect to get fucked. This abject stupidity is granted a psychological plausibility because Felix is a messed up little bunny, with a supposedly tragic conviction of his own profound worthlessness.

Obviously I don’t want to get into real issues here, but I think the reason the dubious consent became one of the bothering aspects of the scene in Corambis is that the sex abuse came plot-approved. I mean, if Felix was walking down the street and happened to get jumped and gang raped by a bunch of guys I think many a reader might rightly cry “Sarah Monette, what the fuck?” as there are very few occasions in which it is either appropriate or necessary to get one of your characters gang raped. But this way he has a “real” reason to put himself voluntarily into a position where he might be. It’s even, perhaps, meant to be on some level noble – in a hopelessly fucked up way, of course. So what you end up with is a deeply uncomfortable situation in which everything conspires, including (conveniently) Felix himself, to create a scenario in which a horrible but beautifully written gang rape is, to an extent, okay. And this is where the aesthetic of suffering starts to come apart at the seams.

Essentially this scene falls right into the uncanny valley. If it was purely designed for titillation I wouldn’t have a problem with it, but as it is there are elements are titillation and elements of horror. We are meant to be shocked and appalled – and it is shocking and appalling – but it’s framed in such a way that we are simultaneously liberated to relish the aesthetic. And quite frankly that leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I think there’s something profoundly hypocritical and, indeed, deeply disturbing in the idea of enjoying both moral outrage and illicit sexual excitement (see Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse). The scene bears all the hallmarks of erotic non-con (there are elements of psychological exposure as well as physical, the victim is physically aroused throughout, the abusers are appreciative of his beauty and his apparent eagerness, and so on and so forth) but worked through a guilt-appeasing filter of “oh gosh, isn’t this terrible.”

My ankles were still chained and somebody had me scruffed like a kitten; I was keening in protest, but I was dragged upright, forced to straddle someone’s thighs, while he continued fucking me with the same relentless steadiness. I was displayed for all of them, my arousal jutting out shamelessly, the tear tracks on my face attesting to my weakness.

Now, I know that, unlike erotic non-con, Felix is not secretly into what’s being done to him and that he’s breaking and being broken here but you still have a scene that’s running in two directions simultaneously and trying to have its cake and eat it. It goes out of its way to tick the non-con wink-wink boxes but then slaps you face in the face with its insistence that this a terrible and traumatic event. Essentially you can’t have a gorgeously written gang rape that positions itself within a carefully constructed aesthetic framework and a psychologically accurate and traumatic portrait of a terrible ordeal.

And, ultimately, I guess you have to ask yourself if it’s okay to have an aesthetic gang rape scene full stop. The idea bothers me less as pornography but here, I would argue, that it gains an added erotic piquancy from the fact it really is annihilating Felix, which, again is troublesome. Essentially it’s why raping Clarissa is so much more interesting than raping Justine, and why it’s all right to get off on the latter and not the former.

The more I’ve thought about this and tried to articulate my issues with it, the more complex and convoluted it has become. There is, of course, an element of the purely personal about – I didn’t like it and it upset me – as well as these more abstract, intellectualizations of it. I dug around on Monette’s Livejournal – on which is usually charming and sensible – to see what I could find and, lo and behold, she has written quite comprehensively on the subject, which I shall now quote pretty much in its entirety:

I knew from very early on that Felix was going to turn back to prostitution to get the money for a doctor for someone he loved (I knew this was going to happen before I knew Mildmay existed), and I knew that he was going to end up in a situation that was completely out of his control and that hurt him badly. Because Felix is reckless and self-destructive and because under all his vanity, he doesn't think he's worth protecting. And because it is a kind of answering horror to his being raped by Malkar at the beginning of Mélusine. And because he needed something that would force him to confront these issues--force him to see that he doesn't deserve to be abused--and it had to be something superlatively unbearable if it was going to get through to him, because Felix has way too much experience at ignoring his own pain.

Say what? So it’s redemptive gang rape, the sort makes you a stronger and better person? What … the … fuck? It’s like those Hollywood amnesia plotlines (one blow to the head gives you amnesia, another blow cures it) except with sexual abuse. I know, again, we’re operating in a fictional sphere but this is so made of wrong that I’ll just content myself with linking to Dan’s article on

the victim dilemma

and throw my hands up in despair.

I quite enjoy Monette’s aestheticisation of suffering, I could probably navigate the uncanny valley if I really had to but I am sick to death of male fantasy writers using sexual abuse as a textual shortcut for character development and I’m damned if I’m going to deal with women doing the same thing. Sarah Monette, you are better than this.

Sexual abuse is not good for you. It happens and people react. Constantly depicting characters who react to it in courageous and life-enhancing ways is not empowering, it’s fucking demeaning to people who struggle along every day as best they can.

I’m sure in a different time in a different mood I’ll pick up Corambis again and I’ll get to page 152 and I’ll shrug and go “gang rape, meh” and read right on.

But not today.Themes:

Damage Report

,

Books

,

Sarah Monette

,

Sci-fi / Fantasy

~

bookmark this with - facebook - delicious - digg - stumbleupon - reddit

~Comments (

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)

Arthur B

at 14:44 on 2009-04-27It's depressing when series go south like this. It's especially annoying when they burn down the virtues of the earlier volumes. I was looking at your first Monette review and you were saying how you were impressed by the fact that Felix was gay, but it kind of wasn't a big deal; I'm getting the impression that as the series goes on that becomes less true, since that LJ extract makes it sounds like Monette intended all along to reduce Felix to a weepy gay man being abused by angry gay men. (If I'm interpreting that right - if Felix pimping himself out predates the existence of Mildmay, that means that Monette was planning to make this happen since before the first book, right?)

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Wardog

at 15:11 on 2009-04-27Mmm, that's part of the problem though. I don't actually think it's "gone south" - despite the Xtreme angst I was quite absorbed until page 152. It was merely that scene that tripped me out. I'm sure if I could put it behind me and just get on with the book, I'd probably really like it.

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Rude Cyrus

at 20:32 on 2009-04-27Great, now I need a shower.

While I suppose rape can be presented as being aesthetically pleasing, like in erotic non-con, I still don't like it. I've always found consenting sex between happy, willing partners infinitely more pleasurable -- don't ask me why. This sort of stuff just makes my skin crawl.

What's funny is that I can make it through The 120 Days of Sodom without blinking, but I think that's because De Sade insisted on using the driest, most tortured language possible.

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Wardog

at 21:15 on 2009-04-27Sorry Cyrus. I'm not sure but I think it's probably easier to be into erotic non-con / rape fantasy if you're a woman than a man, either because you're more likely to imagine yourself as the rapee rather than the rapist which is slightly easier to deal with morally speaking or because the world seems generally reluctant to admit that women can rape people too. Whereas if you're a man who fantasies about forcing women to have sex with him ... well ... hostility many ensue from quarters unwilling to concede the very real difference between fantasy, reality and simulated non-con.

Hmm, I think the thing about 120 Days of Sodom is that, as you say, it's incredibly dull. And de Sade is a terrible writer. There's only one thing worse than a rape scene and that's a badly written rape scene!

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Arthur B

at 21:18 on 2009-04-27I do wonder sometimes whether deSade was an early pen-and-paper troll. Most of his books seem to be the literary equivalent of telling someone a particular link goes to an interesting and thought-provoking philosophy website when actually it points to goatse or 2girls1cup.

I mean, he went to jail for it, but you have to make sacrifices for "the lulz", as I believe the young people call it these days.

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http://roisindubh211.livejournal.com/

at 02:43 on 2009-04-28"Constantly depicting characters who react to it in courageous and life-enhancing ways is not empowering, it’s fucking demeaning to people who struggle along every day as best they can."

I have to disagree here- not with the point you make, but with the accusation being levelled at Monette. Felix has spent three books getting abused and every reaction to it has been, basically, "I was right all along, I am worthless. Hmmm, should I hurt myself again or just re-alienate everyone who cares about me tonight?" The enormity of the gang-rape is something he's not prepared to consider his just desserts, and it isn't the only influence on his growth as a person. A lot has to do with having Mildmay -who has been developing his own self-confidence, on his own, without the help of shitty things happening to him- be there for him and push and push to get him (Felix) not to hurt himself any more.

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Wardog

at 09:13 on 2009-04-28

The enormity of the gang-rape is something he's not prepared to consider his just desserts, and it isn't the only influence on his growth as a person.

I do see your point and I wasn't really dissing Monette, who I actually adore. There was just something about this scene, or the way it was presented, or *something* that was a bridge too far for me. And at first I was inclined to just ignore it and tell myself to stop being a wuss and then I got interested in *why* this scene was so problematic and, secondarily, I realised that, on a wider level, it should probably be okay to stand up and say "for me, this gang rape is not okay."

I will at some point finish Corambis, because I have *hugely* enjoyed the Doctrine of Labyrinths quartet (I have some reviews knocking around here in which I give much sweet sweet love), I think I just need some time to get away from the gang rape.

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Wardog

at 09:29 on 2009-04-28

I do wonder sometimes whether deSade was an early pen-and-paper troll

Dan and I like the idea of historical trolls, and also explains the Marquis far more than most of pop-psych nonsense I've read does =P

Lucifer, of course, would be the first troll - complaining about the mods.

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http://miss-morland.livejournal.com/

at 11:54 on 2009-04-28*giggles at the thought of de Sade and Lucifer as trolls*

I haven't read Monette's books, but I still found this post very interesting - it articulates my issues with non-con and dub-con in fiction very well. (I do wonder, though, if ambiguous portrayals of rape scenes are sometimes meant to make the readers think and question their own attitudes, instead of jumping to the safe reaction of 'OMG so horrible'?)

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Dan H

at 14:25 on 2009-04-28

I do wonder, though, if ambiguous portrayals of rape scenes are sometimes meant to make the readers think and question their own attitudes, instead of jumping to the safe reaction of 'OMG so horrible'?)

You might well be right, but even if that is the intent, it's a deeply flawed one.

Perhaps I'm just an arrogant shit, but I really hate it when people try to make me think about stuff unless it's in a medium *specifically designed* for that.

If you want to challenge my preconceptions about rape, write a book that is *about* challenging my preconcieved notions about rape. Don't try to do it in the middle of a fantasy series that is mostly about hot gay wizards gettin' it on.

If I want to have my ideas about absuse challenged, I'll read Lolita, or possibly I'll track down some abuse-survivors' weblogs. I won't read an otherwise ordinary fantasy novel or, for that matter, watch

Dollhouse

.

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Dan H

at 16:05 on 2009-04-28

The enormity of the gang-rape is something he's not prepared to consider his just desserts

I can't speak for Kyra, but the problem I have with this is that it suggests, falsely, that the more traumatic an experience is the less likely you are to blame yourself for it. I'm by no means an expert on the subject of abuse survival but from my limited experience people's tendency to self-blame for things is wholly unrelated to the severity of the abuse suffered. For that matter, the whole idea of rating abuse experiences in order of severity is a bit of a dodgy precedent.

Essentially I think there's an important, and worrying, difference between "Felix has experienced things like this before but, because he has grown as a person, and because of the influence of Mildmay, he does not blame himself for this experience" and "Felix has experienced things like this before but, because this experience is so much worse than the others, he cannot blame himself for it".

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http://sistermagpie.livejournal.com/

at 21:38 on 2009-05-01I haven't read this last book yet, but I'm glad for the heads-up. Having read the other 3 I can definitely see how this kind of thing would play, and I'm not surprised that she'd planned something like this from the beginning. It does make you think thought, about the idea that this character is constantly going through situations like this, and it's finally when he acheives the kind of abuse he might have always thought would be what he deserved, that he realizes he didn't deserve it. Even if Mildmay and other experiences are also part of his turnaround, I don't know whether that kind of catalyst will click for me the way another one might.

Like, rather than having him be in a situatio that's the same as before, but with one clear difference that makes him see it clearly, it's almost like Helen Keller at the well. Repeated fingerspelling over and over and finally he gets it.

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Wardog

at 15:28 on 2009-05-11I lost this temporarily in the deluge of comments about other things.

It is possible I've over-reacted to the gang rape; I suppose responses to these sort of motifs are always going to be extremely personal. I feel almost hypocritical because, as you say, there's plenty of indication previously that we were on the Sex Abuse Superhighway and something like this was probably bound to happen. But the way it's framed and written, combinated with its narrative function as a catalyst for change really really squicked me out. I know it's not necessarily meant to be psychologically plausible but there's something deeply worrying in the idea that there is a scale of sexual abuse, the extreme end of which teaches you self respect.

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valse de la lune

at 14:04 on 2011-07-12I tracked down

this interview

and I'm now extremely, thoroughly grossed out with Sarah Monette:

I think this does happen to gay male protagonists (the most obvious example is Mercedes Lackey's Last Herald-Mage books). And I think Felix does fall into this trap to a certain extent, although in my defense I will say that the reason he gets raped is because I was interested in the tension inherent in a character who could be both rapist and victim. Which could have been a woman, or a heterosexual man, but it was most obvious and easiest to mobilize with a gay man. I also chose a gay male protagonist because my abiding interest is in the power dynamics of human relationships, especially sexual relationships, and it is VERY VERY HARD to write about that with a heterosexual female protagonist without pigeon-holing her and yourself into either a re-inscription of patriarchal gender roles (male dominant, female submissive) or a simple gender reversal (female dominant, male submissive) (which I did work with some in my novella, "A Gift of Wings," in The Queen in Winter). A lesbian relationship is also a possibility, but it's far more interesting and attention-grabbing to take power away from a man than it is to give power to a woman. [...] Also, because we live in a patriarchal society and have for several thousand years, there's nothing new or shocking about the idea that women are victims. (I'm not saying this is a good thing, mind you.) You can get more narrative charge out of victimizing a man and you aren't reinscribing the same old gender role patterns into that ever deeper groove of men act and women suffer.

What the fuck, Monette? My word, lesbian relationships aren't just ~hawt~ enough unlike slender

yaoi stereotypes

wizards sexing it up and... female empowerment is just too boring? Female victimization is just too

banal

to write about so gay men being degraded (and in this case, often raped by women) has more "narrative charge"? There's also something toward the end that basically goes "well, if you are writing about male rape it's super

titillating

shocking so people will recognize RAPE IS HORRIBLE whereas women being raped is just so

every day

so... hey, manpain! That'll get people

thinking

, right? Right!"

I don't know, all of this reads like the slash fangirl's justification why she's not interested in writing girls but wants to write hot boys instead, all disguised under a pretend layer of ~*soshul justeese*~.

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Wardog

at 23:33 on 2011-07-12Oh dear. I'm actually really annoyed with myself that it took me to Book IV to unpack what was going on with the, err, sexay mainpain and all the arse rape. I did quite like Monette initially - I think partially because when I first read Melusine I was still under the impression that gay characters were pretty rare in fantasy. To give Monette credit, when she actually bothers to be interested in them, she does write interesting female characters - I mean I *loved* Mehitabel from this series.

I think what freaks me out the most is that, as you observe, it's blatant titillation under the label of trangression. I have no problems with people getting their kicks from whatever they get their kicks from, as long as it's a carefully demarcated fantasy space, but pretending it's anything else is deeply toxic.

Also that interview was just awful :(

Maybe it's just because it doesn't apply to me but I don't understand why so many women find two dudes so unbelievably hawt but two women apparently tedious. Ho hum.

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valse de la lune

at 05:06 on 2011-07-13I think gay characters are still pretty rare in fantasy, but the gay dudes all seem to come from the same wellspring of fanfic tropes. I've read all the arguments as to why dudeslash is a female-positive space that enables women to explore their sexuality and I do get some of it, but I can't shake the feeling that so much of that is hot air; no matter how hard a slash fan argues I can't really see how spamming rape at gay dudes is particularly, y'know, feminist. Maybe it plays with power dynamics and whatnot but, on the other hand,

rape culture

.

I don't get the thing with YAY HAWT BOYS EWW GIRLS ARE BORING either, though it's been explained to me that most female characters aren't decently written so people'd sooner generate fanfic about boys instead. But that doesn't fly because fandom churns out great volumes of fanfic dedicated to minor male characters, even though some of them barely have a presence in the book/show/movie--see Figwit of the LOTR movies fame--whereas women, primary or tertiary, still get written out or villified. There are even

bingo cards

. Somewhere in that

is

a valid clause regarding how we're trained to look at media through male gateways thanks to patriarchy and we internalize that. Still don't get it on a personal level because I've always preferred female characters over male, but there it goes.

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Melissa G.

at 06:30 on 2011-07-13

Maybe it's just because it doesn't apply to me but I don't understand why so many women find two dudes so unbelievably hawt but two women apparently tedious. Ho hum.

Speaking as a straight woman who gets paid to translate yaoi, I can understand that pretty well. :-) It's not that I find girls boring as characters, but as someone who isn't sexually attracted to women, I find myself gravitating toward situations where I can look at/write about two sexy boys instead if I'm looking for smexy times. (Though I'm very, very picky these days about yaoi because of tropes I'm sure I've mentioned before.)

I feel some sympathy for Monette because I do have a hard time verbalizing my tastes without resorting to those same basic arguments about power play or feeling the need to judge the female character and how she is portrayed specifically because she's female (which I wish I didn't, but I do so...). What I find odd is the fact that everyone insists on asking me *why* I find male-on-male romance so appealing, and then I'm stuck in this hem-hawing, putting-on-airs defense because I'm too embarrassed to just go, "Two guys doing stuff to each other is hot?"

(Uh-oh, now I'm having Dorian Gray flashbacks. Oh, Ben Barnes, you scamp, you!!)

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Steve Stirling at 07:07 on 2011-07-13

I don't get the thing with YAY HAWT BOYS EWW GIRLS ARE BORING either

-- you get exactly the same in reverse from male writers a lot, so I don't see that there's any mystery about it.

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valse de la lune

at 07:20 on 2011-07-13I don't think Kyra's asking "why male-on-male?" but more "why do people find women inexplicably boring?"

but as someone who isn't sexually attracted to women, I find myself gravitating toward situations where I can look at/write about two sexy boys instead if I'm looking for smexy times.

That doesn't make sense to me because, even outside of sexual context, a lot of slashers just don't want to write women period and I'm sure we don't always only write about what's sexually/romantically attractive to us (or no straight man would ever write male characters).

It also doesn't really answer why women are so villified and hated by fandom at large: why people like Monette believe "it's more interesting to take power away from a man than to give power to a woman," or why slash is passed off as some wonderful female-positive space when it involves a lot of female-negative things, including but not limited to slut-shaming and othering women. Ogle hot boys, whatever (but even so, why so much fucking rape all the fucking time? Why the infantilizing tropes?). But I think you can do that without contributing to misogyny and rape culture.

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Steve Stirling at 07:24 on 2011-07-13

I don't think Kyra's asking "why male-on-male?" but more "why do people find women inexplicably boring?"

-- I don't. I actually had to start flipping coins at one point to make sure my characters weren't predominantly female.

Maybe it's because I was in single-sex schools for a lot of my adolescence, but I just find women more interesting than men. More complex and variable, on average.

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Steve Stirling at 07:38 on 2011-07-13

Ogle hot boys, whatever (but even so, why so much fucking rape all the fucking time? Why the infantilizing tropes?). But I think you can do that without contributing to misogyny and rape culture.

-- I don't read much (any, really) slash, but the actually-published equivalents like the book described here don't seem particularly misogynist to me. Just obsessed with Hot Boys in Chains.

As for the rape and stuff, a lot of people get off on that. Trying to tell people that the sexual fantasies which ring their chimes aren't permissible is roughly equivalent to trying to scold water until it voluntarily runs uphill. Much effort, little result.

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valse de la lune

at 07:45 on 2011-07-13

I don't. I actually had to start flipping coins at one point to make sure my characters weren't predominantly female.

Thank you, Minority Warrior, but if you are a bloke that's not exactly addressed to you.

I don't read much (any, really) slash, but the actually-published equivalents like the book described here don't seem particularly misogynist to me. Just obsessed with Hot Boys in Chains.

I've only read the first book and the gang-rape scene in the fourth, but a lot of the women in this series like to rape gay men for some strange reason.

Melusine

opens with an anecdote about the pure, true love between men. Two women get between it; one proceeds to rape one of the men repeatedly until he wants to kill himself. So, yes, both fandom slash and published slash perpetuate a lot of the same crap. Then there's Monette's interview and strange leaps of illogic which read sexist as hell to me.

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Melissa G.

at 08:48 on 2011-07-13

That doesn't make sense to me because, even outside of sexual context, a lot of slashers just don't want to write women period and I'm sure we don't always only write about what's sexually/romantically attractive to us (or no straight man would ever write male characters).

I can't speak to that. I don't know why so many writers are so anti-female characters, and it would take me pages of musing to try and come to a conclusion. I was referring specifically to sexual situations (by which I mean stories centering on sex) because the comment I was particularly responding to was "why do so many women find two dudes so unbelievably hot but two women apparently tedious". Which I read as "why do so many women love writing about two guys (sexually) but find writing about two women so boring (sexually)". Perhaps I misinterpreted what Kyra was saying. I stated clearly that I don't find women boring as characters to read and write about, but that I understand why many women gravitate toward male homosexual relationships and why they might find it arousing when they are writing merely to titillate themselves/others.

I haven't read the series in question so I take everyone's word for it that the rape isn't handled well and misogyny abounds. And trust me, I'm the first person to get fed up with the kind of tropes male-on-male stuff tends to come with - especially when written by someone who's probably never even spoken to a gay man before. I got fed up with one author in particular because her protagonists kept falling for their rapists, yuck. But just because a lot of it sucks and perpetuates some seriously shitty stuff doesn't mean that it's not okay to find guy-on-guy stuff hot. And I really don't appreciate being made to feel like because I like it, I am somehow in danger of losing my feminist card.

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valse de la lune

at 09:57 on 2011-07-13I don't think I have been suggesting that if you like slash, you're in danger of losing your feminist cred; being a feminist doesn't exactly mean everything you consume must be feminist, after all, and we all enjoy things that are problematic to some degree. I just don't like how it's put forward as a YAY WOMEN field when it's not really. Likewise, I've been shouted down in fandom spaces for calling out misogyny in slash, something along the line of

you will find it is you who is misogyny

.

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valse de la lune

at 10:06 on 2011-07-13(Sorry that I'm coming down harshly such that you feel you're being discredited as a feminist, though.)

One more thing--I've been told over and over that there is a strong presence of queer women in slash circles, so for some it's not so much a matter of "I'm straight so more cocks yay!!!" In fact, with so many queer women around--so many lesbians even--you'd think there would be more F/F fanfic. But there isn't, so...

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Melissa G.

at 10:23 on 2011-07-13

I don't think I have been suggesting that if you like slash, you're in danger of losing your feminist cred

I think I was responding defensively to this comment:

Ogle hot boys, whatever (but even so, why so much fucking rape all the fucking time? Why the infantilizing tropes?). But I think you can do that without contributing to misogyny and rape culture.

It basically felt to me like my entire sexual preference/fetish/whatever was being boiled down to "ogling hot boys". It’s those kinds of dismissive, judgmental comments that make me feel like I need to somehow justify what I find arousing. That’s why you have people arguing that it’s pro-women or empowering or whatever to write and read man-on-man love stories. When an attraction is called into question, I think often women in particular feel the need to base that attraction in something intellectual and philosophical. Because it would be wrong for a woman to just find something titillating or arousing. Because women aren’t supposed to like sex just for sex.

I think there are ways that it can be empowering (I wouldn't go so far as to say 'feminist'), but most of it fails in this regard. For me, when I read a story with a male bottom that I can relate to as far as sexual behavior, it makes me feel less weird. There's something freeing about the behavior being related to the position and not the gender, for me anyway. I think that also relates to why an author might find it more interesting (and by interesting I mean because they find it hot) to take power away from men. For some women who are attracted to men, there is something very fascinating and seductive about a man submitting (either sexually or emotionally), probably because it's something so commonly associated with female behavior. So again, it becomes less of a gender thing and more of a relationship role thing. If that makes any sense....

I just don't like how it's put forward as a YAY WOMEN field when it's not really.

I totally understand that. I actually avoid fan written slash like the plague because most of it is just not good. Most of it is (I think) influenced by yaoi, which oh dear god, has such problems. There is so much rape and questionable consent and a lot of "I'm only gay for that guy" and such overly traditional female behavior (even though one of them is male, go figure). And the kind of people you've probably argued with are likely the kind of people who make me afraid to admit I'm part of the yaoi subculture.

But there is good stuff out there. I promise. :-)

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Melissa G.

at 10:26 on 2011-07-13

One more thing--I've been told over and over that there is a strong presence of queer women in slash circles, so for some it's not so much a matter of "I'm straight so more cocks yay!!!" In fact, with so many queer women around--so many lesbians even--you'd think there would be more F/F fanfic. But there isn't, so...

Sorry, I made my long post before I saw this! That is odd. Why don't they focus on yuri? Yuri is slowly becoming a more female dominated genre. It's kind of cool actually that the female authors are slowly co-opting a genre that was once basically male-written lesbian porn for men. To each their own, I guess?

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valse de la lune

at 10:59 on 2011-07-13

It basically felt to me like my entire sexual preference/fetish/whatever was being boiled down to "ogling hot boys".

But... I said that because I think it's pretty dandy if you're just in it for the ogling of hot boys, or balls being cupped gently, or even self-lubing anuses. I don't think you, or anyone else, need to justify it any further than that. Think it's hot? Go for it! That's excellent. Objectifying

men

in and of itself, separate from the concern over straight people fetishizing homosexuality, doesn't really bother me. I'm not questioning the appeal of slash: I'm questioning some of the tropes, the homophobia, the misogyny. Which certainly aren't universal, but there sure is a lot of them to go around. Hell, gay male characters written by straight men also get raped an awful lot (hi Richard Morgan, thank you for that graphic schoolboy gang rape).

Disclosure: I think lesbians are awesome. I'd like to read more stuff with lesbian representation. Being homoromantic does have something to do with it, though.

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Melissa G.

at 11:11 on 2011-07-13

But... I said that because I think it's pretty dandy if you're just in it for the ogling of hot boys, or balls being cupped gently, or even self-lubing anuses. I don't think you, or anyone else, need to justify it any further than that.

:-) I think it just came off as hostile because of the swearing, lol. To be honest, I was probably overly defensive because it's kind of a touchy thing for me.

I'm not questioning the appeal of slash: I'm questioning some of the tropes, the homophobia, the misogyny.

Yes, I'm with you here. I have a lot of trouble with a lot of boy/boy stuff that's out there.

Re: Lesbians

If you're looking to try out some yuri, I can lead you to some scanlation sites. I haven't read much yuri so I can't totally vouch for the content, but these are sites that I know of:

Lililicious

Payapaya

Just be sure to check for ratings and such. There was one on Lilicious I read years ago that I was enjoying.

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valse de la lune

at 11:14 on 2011-07-13OMG yay :D :D :D Thanks for the links. My friend's been sending me some too. I'm also quite pleased to see that a lot of yuri writers are female. Awesome.

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Cammalot

at 15:23 on 2011-07-13I JUST WANNA WATCH DUDES EMOTE. ;-)

I actually got into yaoi (not slash for whatever reason) because I was attracted to what I thought was the innate equality in such a a relationship. There are a variety of reasons I don't really seek out much fanfic anymore (one of which is the decade-plus that has gone by) but one of them is that I don't really see that equality getting embraced. (I'm necessarily truncating this, I have to imitate being a productive employee at the moment.)

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Melissa G.

at 19:40 on 2011-07-13

I JUST WANNA WATCH DUDES EMOTE. ;-)

Ooh, yes, good observation. I like that too.

I actually got into yaoi (not slash for whatever reason) because I was attracted to what I thought was the innate equality in such a a relationship.

Ditto. That's what I really like about it too, which is why I hate when they skew the power dynamic too far in one direction without somehow compensating for it in another way. I've never been into fanfic, but I do love doujinshi.

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Cammalot

at 19:48 on 2011-07-13I wrote up this whole long comment yesterday, but today with you guys' further conversation I realized I was addressing something that Pyro was not talking about, so I'm tweaking, but I don't think I'll have a chance to get to it today.

The extremely short version is that there's a very definite blockage that some women seem to have about writing women, and I had it myself for some time (and that some more extreme versions of it outright baffle me), and have spent a lot of time trying to process, discuss, and debate what the fuck that is about. With theories. I have theories.

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Melissa G.

at 19:53 on 2011-07-13

The extremely short version is that there's a very definite blockage that some women seem to have about writing women,

Definitely noticed this myself at times. I gravitate toward writing male characters, or at least I used to. I'm very interested to hear your theories whenever you find the time to write them up. :-)

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Sister Magpie

at 20:07 on 2011-07-13

Sorry, I made my long post before I saw this! That is odd. Why don't they focus on yuri? Yuri is slowly becoming a more female dominated genre. It's kind of cool actually that the female authors are slowly co-opting a genre that was once basically male-written lesbian porn for men. To each their own, I guess?

I would guess that that's probably not all that related to the whole "that's my kink" thing, only not all kinks are sexual. That is, expecting them to explain it would probably be similar to having anybody explain why they find one thing more hot than another.

For instance, I like het and I like slash, but there are certain kinds of stories that could definitely be considered non-sexual kinks that I am more likely to read about in a m/m pairing than a f/m pairing or f/f pairing. I suppose I could try to relate it to power issues with gender IRL, but it's probably more just a kink if it's something I've pretty much always been drawn to.

I don't find that rape or "I'm only gay for that guy" seems to dominate most of the slash I come across, but I think that might often come down to different pairings leaning towards different dynamics. Or else also some authors being better than most.

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Steve Stirling at 22:44 on 2011-07-13Pyrofennec:

-of the women in this series like to rape gay men for some strange reason.Melusine opens with an anecdote about the pure, true love between men. Two women get between it; one proceeds to rape one of the men repeatedly until he wants to kill himself.

Sarah Monette has the dubious honour of having replaced Robin Hobb in my fickle affections as the only fantasy writer I'll buy in hardback. The Mirador is the third book in Monette's Doctrine of Labyrinths quartet, books one and two of which I have reviewed/admired here and here respectively. Despite the eagerness with which I initially starting reading, The Mirador seems to occupy a rather awkward place in the story arc. There's rather a lot of build up for very little pay off and I was left with a vaguely unsatisfied feeling and only the fuzziest idea of what's supposed to be going on. This was not so much plot related as direction related " I suppose it's foolish to expect narrative sign posts in a series of books themed around labyrinths but, still, reading The Mirador made me feel lost. On the other hand, I'm hesitant of being too critical because of my profound affection for the first two books and I suspect, as with Melusine and The Virtu, the fourth book will contextualise the third to such an extent that my criticisms will turn out to be pointless.

Gosh, this excess of good faith is making me nervous.

The Mirador picks up two years after The Virtu so at least Monette hasn't gone completely George RR Martin on us yet. But nothing much seems to have changed. Mildmay still hates The Mirador. Felix is still wrecked. And they're still not having hot incestuous gay love, dammit. To be fair, I don't think this is likely to ever be the case but a girl can dream, right? The point of this book, inasmuch as I can find it, seems to be setup for book four, which requires sending Felix and Mildmay into exile together, and to demonstrate just how deep the damage done to both brothers by their upbringing runs. The advantage of this is that the book avoids oversimplifications and it is rarely the case that any one thing can be traced back to any other, the disadvantage is that it's as slow as snails on sedatives. It is painful, absolutely painful, to watch Felix and Mildmay's relationship creeping along, occasionally even doubling back on itself or plunging yet further into the abyssal depths of utter failure and misery. It doesn't help that they're both pursuing seemingly unconnected plotlines " Mildmay is trying to work out why his girlfriend was killed way back in book one and Felix is messing around with ghosts " which makes it feel as though they might as well be in different books since it gives them plenty of excuses not to deal with each other.

I was glad, however, to see an increased focus on Mehitabel Parr, first introduced in The Virtu. Part actress, part courtesan, part (reluctant) spy she's just an incredibly cool and entertaining character, and a splendid antidote to those terminally angsty, insecure boys. Like the two preceding books, The Mirador is told through the shifting first person narration of its central characters. After two books of Felix and Mildmay,I was very very ready for Mehitabel, even though Monette's presentation of her voice is slightly assured than that of the other two. The narration, as ever, is utterly absorbing although Felix felt increasingly distant as the book progressed. In some ways, I suppose, he is the most difficult character in that I have always felt slightly unconvinced by his much vaunted charisma and cruelty. This book seems to evade the problem by having most of his exploits in this field related second hand, which is more than a little frustrating. There are only so many times you can deal with Mildmay recollecting an overheard argument and wincing. But Mehitabel's perspective on the two very familiar characters is both refreshing and illuminating.

Like its predecessors, The Mirador is primarily character-driven and, therefore, it seems churlish to complain about the plot or lack thereof. But it really is labyrinthine in the negative sense, in that I found it difficult to grasp where things were going, or why, and what was important or why. Possibly I'm just dumb but there's intricate and then there's incoherent. I am, however, reserving judgement on The Mirador

because I'm just not ready to accept that this could be bad

The Virtu is the sequel to Melusine, which I gush about in my review here, and starts almost exactly where Melusine finished. Having been restored to health and (relative) sanity, the gay ex-prostitute wizard (no, I'm never going to tire of writing that) Felix Harrowgate and his brother, the adorable cat-burglar Mildmay, head back to the city of Melusine to finish the plot. There isn't much to say in this review that I didn't say in my review of Melusine: the same problems and the same strengths apply, and I still love these books to pieces and I heartily recommend them.

Melusine and The Virtu are very much a pair. I'm not sure what creative or editorial process went into the decision to split the books in two but it's very much of the George R.R. Martin "I will stop writing here" school, which inspires a certain amount of irritation in me because, series or not, some part of me believes a book should be, to some extent, a self-contained artefact. You can't read Melusine without The Virtu (or vice versa) and many of the minor difficulties I had with the first book are rendered irrelevant by the second. We return to the secondary characters I felt had fallen by the wayside and the rather labyrinthine plot gains sufficient pace and focus to offer a satisfying conclusion. Additionally, when taken together, the two books provide a plot that, by fantasy standards, has a rather elegant structure; it's a real shame to lose that sense of coherence and direction.

The characters are, again, the main strength of The Virtu, although the angst quotient ratchets through the roof. It's something of a relief to encounter a sane and lucid Felix, although if anything it makes his occasionally quite hideously selfish behaviour even less forgivable than it was in the first book. On the other hand, Mildmay, my favourite character, dissolves into a passive-aggressive stew of insecurity and is somewhat less compelling because of it. I remember complaining in the review of Melusine that Mildmay's life until his encounter with Felix, although interesting, seemed a little irrelevant but it is granted weight and context by the action of the second book, and serves as a necessary illumination of the character traits that come to the fore in his dealings with Felix, specifically his passive aggressive insecurity. Sigh. The developing relationship between the two brothers remains fascinating, however, and is flavoured by a teasing frisson of incestuous attraction that, having an attractive younger half-brother of my own, probably ought to have threatened and disgusted me but instead seemed mainly to inspire eager cries of "just shag already." And the introduction of a third character, the actress-turned-governess Mehitabel Parr (kind of like a sexy Jane Eyre) was a refreshing addition to the book, especially since her no-nonsense but compassionate nature seems in no way disposed towards angst. As ever, Monette's characterisation is deft and detailed and, quite frankly, I'm just delighted to encounter an interesting and original female character in a fantasy novel. I hope for more of Mehitabel Parr in further books.

Like Melusine, I occasionally found in The Virtu a dissonance between the way in which characters are described and the qualities they display, for example the much vaunted charisma that allows Felix to charm almost every character they encounter and hold his place in high wizard society. We mainly see Felix through Mildmay's awe-struck eyes but, as a reader, I am never convinced or drawn in by his magnetism. Similarly, the villain of the piece, Malkar, does horrendous things and acquires a backplot but, in spite of this, his malignance never feels particularly real.

Don't you just hate it when you start out liking something in a smug, ironic way and somehow end up it liking it for real? I began Sarah Monette's Melusine (which, for the record, sports a half-naked wizard on the cover with a haunted look in his eyes and a flag of red hair flying out behind him) expecting trashy, easily mockable fun but, having devoured the book with such enthusiasm and responded in such a genuine way to the characters, I cannot in good conscience deride it. Yes, it's trashy fantasy but only in the sense that it possesses in abundance all the strengths of that kind of book, by which I mean it's engrossing, intriguing and blissfully easy to read. Textual chocolate, if you will; the best, sweetest most meltingly delightful Lindt chocolate. Indulge yourself.

Here be (mild) Spoilers

Set in the pseudo-Renaissance(ish) city of Melusine, the book follows the fortunes of two half brothers, the seemingly upper-class Felix Harrowgate, spectacularly screwed up wizard, and the staunchly lower-class Mildmay, slightly less screwed up cat burglar. Felix gets tangled up in a Dastardly Plot to overthrow the city's magic and goes through about three hundred pages of hell, in which he is raped, abused, threatened, driven mad, sent to a lunatic asylum, forced to take the fall for the Dastardly Plot and generally broken into a thousand tiny pieces, before he and Mildmay finally meet.

As I said earlier, the book capitalises on many of the strengths of the genre, but it also shares some of its weaknesses. If you actually want, y'know, something to happen fantasy is perhaps not the genre for you. There is, I am sure, a plot in there some where but the characterisation is so deft and the world so well delineated that I actually didn't notice its absence. The book only really finds its focus when fate and circumstance bring Felix and Mildmay together; the preceding action feels rather like an excessively long prologue. Felix's plot, at least, has the virtue of necessity; understanding what he's gone through is a small step in the direction of not finding him unbelievably irritating and he is, after all, the key to the plot. Mildmay, however, seems to be marking time until the book moves on sufficiently to allow him to fulfil his main role in the story as Felix's only protector. Although things happen to him, they all feel a little irrelevant.

Ultimately, though, this is typical of the genre; it doesn't have prologues, it has first books. And, on the subject of first books, Melusine is clearly the introduction to a series, and very little attempt is made to maintain its readability as a standalone book. If I didn't know Amazon was winging book two, The Virtu, to me as I type, this review would be harsher because I'd be screaming with frustration. The internet tells me Melusine and The Virtu were originally planned as one book, which perhaps goes some way to explaining (if not excusing) the weakness of the ending.

On the other hand, although not a satisfactory conclusion to the action of the story, it was nevertheless a satisfactory conclusion in terms of character. One of the things I particularly relished about Melusine is the depth and detail of the characterisation and, whether it not it was a deliberate decision or a consequence of the division of the book, I found myself appreciating the way the Big Plot is always subsidiary to individual actions and character, especially in the sort of genre where saving-the-world-from-evil tends to be the order of the day. Basically I'm trying to say that if you're used to the way fantasy works then you'll have no problems with Melusine and you'll be refreshed by things-not-happening for legitimate character reasons as opposed to pointless fantasy tourism or spurious authorial intent. If you're not a fantasy aficionado, Melusinemight still be an excellent place to start but wait until Sarah Monette has finished the series.

Melusine is narrated in alternating sections from the perspective of its two central characters; the constant changes in perspective and attitude works exceptionally well, and gives the book the same sort of bite-sized moreishness as the early Song of Ice and Fire novels. Felix and Mildmay have very different voices, Felix's very i-centric, faintly evasive, often madness-driven, interiority-focused narration contrasts strikingly with Mildmay's wryly humorous and action-packed street cant. It's the perfect device for exploring the world without subjecting the reader to tedious world-building exercises (sorry if I sound bitter, I've been living on the equivalent of a Super Sized Me diet of fantasy novels) and very soon creates an intense bond between the reader and the characters. I am hugely impressed by Monette's ability to evoke the atmosphere and the richness of her world without sacrificing the pace of the book in unnecessary explanations for the sake of the reader. The complicated calendar is an excellent example of this; knowing it's there enriches the reader's experience but I am infinitely grateful that Monette felt no obligation to inflict its intricate workings upon me.

The character of Mildmay is, quite simply, wonderful. Monette somehow succeeds in completely rejuvenating the stock fantasy trope of the thief-with-a-heart-of-gold. His street-slang is very well judged, never impedes intelligibility and never feels like a gimmick. The language slips occasionally. I remember tripping over "it commenced to rain" Mildmay, surely, would never use commence if he could say start. But for the most part he's beautifully written; his stories of the city and its history, particularly, are fascinating.

The Felix sections are slightly more difficult to deal with than the Mildmay ones I was certainly interested in him but I'm still not sure whether I like him, or how far the author wants us to forgive his flaws and think he's cool. To be fair he spends most of the book being mad or driven mad but, regardless of whatever brilliance he possess, he is still vain, self-destructive and shallow. There are reasons for this but the fact that Mildmay survived his (admittedly slightly less gruelling) upbringing with compassion, integrity and generosity intact and Felix turned into an utter prick doesn't do him any favours. As a case in point, near the end of the book, the brothers finally arrive at the Gardens of Nephele where they hope to find a cure for Felix's madness. Mildmay nearly kills himself getting Felix there; it is telling that, on waking up, his first act is to ask about his brother, whereas Felix's, on being cured, is to ask for some earrings to remind him of his former life of high society glory. Enough said?

Although an utterly absorbing technique, there are some problems with the alternating narration. It focuses the book so completely on Felix and Mildmay that secondary characters seem shadowy. The wizards were particularly indistinguishable, and very often secondary characters would fall away with little or no explanation. It makes sense that they would (Felix and Mildmay aren't omniscient after all) but it does make the book occasionally emotionally unsatisfying. Furthermore, because we only ever see other characters through the eyes of Felix or Mildmay it makes them less convincing than perhaps they could be. The villain, Malkar, for example, purrs in a sinister fashion and does terrible things to Felix but his plans, motivations and behaviour remain so oblique that he seems to be being Evil simply for the sake of it. And as for Felix's former lover, the beautiful Shannon, he basically flounces through the book, professes love for Felix but fails utterly to support him and throws a huff when the abused and broken Felix won't sleep with him. This little betrayal would have been far more effective had I been able to see even slightly what Felix saw in him. Similarly, we are constantly told that Felix has a cruel and devastating wit; but, when he isn't being mad, his flaying tongue seems primarily capable of delivering a fairly juvenile brand of sarcasm. I feel his pain.

Before I wrap this up in a storm of praise and adoration, I probably ought to make some mention of non PG content. Some pretty nasty stuff happens to Felix early on in the book including a rape scene that, although not graphic, is still quite unpleasant. And, let's face it, any book in which one of the protagonists could be described as "an ex-prostitute gay wizard" isn't likely to be appeal to everyone. Oh yes, I should probably say that Felix is gay, which could presumably be offensive to homophobes. I should add that Felix is gay in a rather well-done and understated way. He just is: no big deal. Move along. Nothing to see here.

In conclusion then, and nitpicking aside, this book is one of the most enjoyable works of fantasy I've read for what feels like a very long time. If you don't mind the slightly risqu content and won't be put off by the lack of a concrete conclusion, I heartily recommend that you give Melusine a go. It's immensely engaging, has a genuinely rich and complex setting that never oppresses you with unnecessary detail, and two excellently written protagonists. I'd even go so far as to say that it has revived my interest in fantasy. I could gush more but The Virtu has just arrived and I have to run off and read it.Themes:

Books

,

Sarah Monette

,

Sci-fi / Fantasy

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Rami

at 22:17 on 2007-01-27Sounds good! The only other fantasy I've ever read that featured a gay character was Trudi Canavan's Black Magician trilogy, which did do the "OMG it's a GAY! How will the society DEAL with THIS?" thing a bit too much...

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Wardog

at 22:54 on 2007-01-27Yeah, I loved it to pieces. I've so far ducked the Black Magician Trilogy but I may get round to it at some point. Mercedes Lackey does a selection of gay wizards as well, but they spend all their timing angsting and never getting laid. What is with wizards and teh gay - there's probably an article in there somewhere. I think it must be the fact they're generally depicted wearing dresses...err...robes. Can't be good for the manhood. I really like the fact Felix's sexual preferences are incidental - of course he's getting all incestuous over Mildmay now so it'll be interesting to see where Monette goes with that.

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http://ruderetum.blogspot.com/

at 10:51 on 2009-09-13Another one wich is perhaps rather more bisexual is David Feintuch's The Still, which is also handled very realistically when it comes to peoples reactions and all.

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Wardog

at 13:05 on 2009-09-13Oh really? I'm kind of burned off pretty, vulnerable, sexually ambivalent heroes for the moment (I didn't enjoy the 4th book of this series, for example, there's a Damage Report knocking around somewhere) but thanks for the recommendation. I'll look it out one of these days.

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http://ruderetum.blogspot.com/

at 13:00 on 2009-09-16It's a good book and it was nice to remember it after I read your article. That has happened quite often after I stumbled in your site while reading the articles. I read The Still as an adolescent in 1997 and I was a bit confused to really appreciate its kind of...hard fantasy, if that's the correct term.

I should probably read it again myself, since on recollection, it is a very well written work, with good characterization. It takes the risk of intentionally building the central character as an arrogant whiny teenager who, although with some reason, alianates people close to him before he learns how to behave like an adult and be a good leader. Although the he is a he and a heir to the throne to boot, it really centres on his development into aa adult and what it costs a person to be a leader.

Also, I'm not sure, but I think it might be pretty unique in a western fantasy story to have a love triangle of two males and a female where its center is on the male and it is represented completely straight and serious without comedy and with significant effect on the plot and not necessarily in a good way.

Sorry, but I'm unaccustomed in writing in english so the sentences seem to build up a bit. Oh well, more practice I guess.

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Wardog

at 16:32 on 2009-09-16Your English is thoroughly excellent - and much better than my command of any other language. I'm definitely curious now, sounds like a really interesting book and I'll certainly try to lay my hands on a copy now, and I think you're right, a straight up love triangle that isn't two women / one man seems pretty rare. I can't think of any other examples, actually.

I'm not quite sure what 'hard fantasy' is compared to say, 'hard sci-fi' (which I know is lots of science) but I guess I'll find out when I read it :)

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Damn you, Joe Abercrombie, damn you. I was fully intending to wait until Best Served Cold came out in paperback but I made the mistake of “perusing” it in Borders coffee shop while waiting for a friend. Well, one thing led to another and, what can I say, less than an hour later I'd bought the thing. My attitude to Joe Abercrombie is probably best described as ambiguous; I found The First Law trilogy

exciting

but also

frustrating

and ultimately, I ditheringly concluded,

unsatisfying.

As with The First Law trilogy, I started Best Served Cold in a paroxysm of wild enthusiasm that got more and more complicated as the book progressed. By the end I wasn’t entirely sure what I thought, although the fact I got there at the speed I did proves one thing at least: the man can write a gripping story. And, even though I have yet to fully establish whether I actually like what he writes, I’m still hopelessly intrigued by his books.

Best Served Cold is one of those rare, under-appreciated jewels: a fantasy one shot. It’s also, as the title indicates, a revenge-tale, with all the attendant heritage. The heroine is a member of a deadly assassin squad but when she tries to leave the group, their leader finds her and shoots her. But she doesn’t die, she just goes into a coma and when she wakes up she vows to get even on all the people who tried to murder her … oh wait that’s something else. Let me try again. The heroine is the leader of a mercenary army but when she gets too powerful, the man she is working for arranges to have her murdered. But she doesn’t die, she just horribly scarred and broken and when she wakes up she vows to get even on all the people who tried to murder her.

Okay, my plot summary is now unhelpfully crap because I wanted to make a cheap point about revenge stories. The heroine is called Monzcarro (Monza) Murcatto. Her nemesis is Grand Duke Orso, although her hit list totals an ambitious seven, all of whom were in some way involved in the brutal attempt on her life that led to the death of her beloved brother. Along way to vengeance she assembles the expected motley crew, a distinctly unmagnificent seven. What starts out a relatively simple slaughterfest soon spirals out of control in a way that cannot fail to affect not only those caught up its immediate vicinity but a battle-torn kingdom. The cast encompasses some familiar faces from the First Law trilogy, the Northman Caul Shivers, Glokta’s assistant Vitari, and, of course, the famed soldier of fortune, Nicomo Cosca, but they’re joined by an array of new and original misfits, including Morveer the self-proclaimed master poisoner, his pretty assistant Day and Friendly, the number-obsessed, borderline autistic murderer.

The main problem with revenge stories is that you have to suspend your disbelief over the premise itself. So you have this Duke, right. Who’s so totally ruthless he spent the last eight years subduing Styria so he can be King on’t. Who’s so totally ruthless he’s willing to murder his Captain General for fear of betrayal. Who’s so totally ruthless he gets five guys to carry it out while he and a random banker look on. But who’s not quite ruthless enough to ensure he’s done the deed probably before flinging the body down a cliff.

As Dan would say, that’s a very specific level of ruthlessness.

If that doesn’t bug the crap out of you from the get go, I suspect you’ll do all right with Best Served Cold.

It should go without saying but: there’s gonna be spoilers okay but nothing too catastrophic

Like The First Law trilogy, there’s an extent to which Best Served Cold is an act of deconstruction, aimed both at the fantasy genre and at the tropes of the revenge plot as well. One of Abercrombie’s strengths was a writer is the way he constantly forces his reader to evaluate her own expectations by refusing to fulfill them. Best Served Cold, which is presented in a rather episodic way, is a succession of misdirections and wrong-turnings. This is reflected in the chaotic way the events unfold, repeatedly defying even the most meticulous planning, and in the flawed, inadequate interactions of the characters, for example the spiraling tension between Morveer and his assistant, and the abortive love affair between Monza and Shivers. Revenge piles upon revenge, betrayal upon betrayal, and the personal and the political become hopelessly entangled. The problem, however, with the revenge story is that, deconstructed or not, Abercrombie doesn’t seem to have much to say on the subject beyond “is not so great acktually.”

Although I did it primarily for laughs, the comparison between Kill Bill and Best Served Cold has slightly more thought behind it than I initially indicated. If I was feeling particularly glib I might be inclined to say Joe Abercrombie is the Quentin Tarantino of fantasy fiction. He’s obsessed with genre conventions, he’s extremely stylish, violent and action-orientated, but when you stop and think about it for a moment it’s all just a little bit shallow. Here’s one of Monza’s victims on the subject of revenge:

"If you could get even what good would it do you? All this expenditure of effort, pain, treasure, blood for what. Who is ever left better off for it ... not the avenged dead, certainly. They rot on regardless. Not those who are avenged upon, of course. Corpses all. And what of the those who take vengeance what of them? Do they sleep easier, do you suppose, once they have heaped murder on murder, sown the bloody seeds of a hundred other retributions?”

It’s all been said, and shown, a thousand times before. What Abercrombie does accomplish, however, alongside standard meditations on the futility of revenge, is its diminution to something banal. Everyone’s got something against someone, and the nested sequences of betrayals and retributions are very effective. Ultimately, Best Served Cold is well worth a read. If you’re a supporter of stand-alone fantasy, you enjoyed The First Law trilogy or you like your fantasy low and nasty, I’d heartily recommend it. Abercrombie writes well, especially his action sequences. He’s one of the few fantasy authors I’ve encountered whose battle scenes I can read without glazing over. I don’t know how he does it but not only do I understand what’s going on in them, I’m actually interested:

“The Baolish were breaking through in earnest, boiling out of the widening gaps in Rogont's shattered right wing like the rising tide through a wall of sand. Monza could hear their shrill cries as they streamed up the slope, see their tattered banners waving, the glitter of metal on the move. The lines of archers above them dissolved all at once, men tossing away their bows and running for the city...”

He’s also very funny, in a grim kind of way. Here’s Nicomo Cosca (famed soldier of fortune) hiring some violent scumbags who claim to be entertainers:

Their eyes darted about, narrow and suspicious, dirty hands clutching a set of stained instruments. They shuffled up in front of the table, one of them scratching his groin, another prodding at a nostril with his drumstick “And you are,” asked Cosca. “We're a band,” the nearest said. “And has your band a name?” They looked at each other. “No, why would it?” “Your own names then, if you please and your specialities, both as entertainer and fighter.” “My name's Solter, I play the drum and the mace.” Flicking his greasy coat back to show the dull glint of iron. “I'm better with the mace if I'm honest.” “I'm Morc,” said the next in line, “pipe and cutlass.” “Olopin. Horn and hammer.” “Olopin as well.” Jerking a thumb sideways. “Brother to this article. Fiddle and blades.” Whipping a pair of long knives from his sleeves and spinning 'em round his fingers The last one had the most broken nose Shivers had ever seen and he'd seen some bad ones. “Gurpie. Lute and lute.” “You fight with your lute?” asked Cosca “I hits 'em with it just so.” The man showed off a sideways swipe, then flashed two rows of shit coloured teeth. “There's a great axe hidden in the body.”

The other big advantage of reading Abercrombie is that he ruthlessly cuts through all the crap I hate about fantasy fiction. I still remember the dizzy joy I felt when, after a small amount of build up regarding the invasion of the Gurkish in Before They Are Hanged, the Gurkish did, in fact, invade. Instead of waiting obligingly until the climax of book three. In Best Served Cold, the first vengeance-killing occurs within the 50 pages, and the next about 50 pages after that. Words cannot express how much I adore the way Abercrombie has things happen in his books. And it’s refreshing to see the usual conventions of fantasy get torn down around you – people break under torture and the damage is permanent, love and sex aren’t redemptive, if you go up against a superior swordsman you will lose.

The characters are your usual Abercrombie Bag of irredeemable, flawed but somehow weirdly sympathetic arseholes. Because there’s a significantly larger major cast than in The First Law Trilogy, I found Abercrombie’s handle on them a little less assured. Unlike The First Law trilogy in which changes of perspective were, for the most part, limited to chapters, the POV jumps around quite a lot and it’s easy to lose track of whose head you’re supposed to be in. They mostly have distinctive voices – Shivers says ain’t and ‘em, Friendly thinks in numbers, Morveer is florid – but it feels like linguistic frosting. Possibly I’m just wearing my Nostalgia Glasses but to read the First Law trilogy is to be completely saturated in the thoughts and worldview of Glokta, Jezel and Logen, whereas Best Served Cold seems to offer only the tourist highlights of personality. Furthermore, juggling such a large cast means there are some characters who barely register – Vitari, doting mother and torturer, is sidelined (again) and I have no idea what Abercrombie was trying to do with Morveer’s assistant, Day.

I had trouble with Monza, as well. She’s not designed to be a sympathetic character but, I suspect, she’s meant to be understandable and even attractive. She’s certainly a more successful attempt at a strong woman than Ferro was. I usually find there’s a point in vengeance narratives in which I lose all ability to empathise with the main character, the moment when Dantes becomes Monte Cristo; a deliberate device, on the part of authors, I’m sure, to show the de-humanising affects of an obsession with revenge. However, I never lost touch with Monza in that way, which, again, contributed to the way revenge functions in the text: not as something alien and outlandish, but as something common to all. The problem was, I didn’t really manage to invest her in the first place. One of the main reasons Monza retains her humanity is that her revenge is as much for her brother as for herself. This taps into yet another convention of the genre: the idea that vengeance for others has an inherent nobility, compared to vengeance for oneself. As the story unfolds, we learn that Monza’s brother is a traitorous, avaricious waste of space, which, I suspect, is meant to problematise Monza’s crusade, and undermine any nobility we might have attributed to her. Unfortunately, since her brother is practically introduced as Bastard McBastard of the Principality of Bastardry and everyone, I mean everyone, is constantly going on about what a bastard he was, the overall effect of this is to make Monza look like a total idiot. And I can’t imagine that was deliberate.

On the other hand I did really like the way her relationship with Shivers developed and then fell apart. At first it seems that Shivers, clinging to his vow to be a better man and characterised by by an innate sense of decency, might serve as a redemptive influence upon her. And there’s a nice gender-reversal to it at as well: he is both materially dependent upon and emotionally vulnerable to her. Shivers, in his way, wants to find hope in the world. Monza believes there is none. Watching them ruin and break each other, each at times denying the other salvation, and Shivers’ eventual transformation into Monza’s creature entirely (albeit not in any way she would want) is deeply unpleasant but also strangely satisfying. It is a tale not so often told, and rarely done well.

The other stand-out character of Best Served Cold (I’m deliberately not mentioning Nicomo Cosca, famed solider of fortune, of whom Abercrombie is blatantly far too fond) is Castor Morveer, master poisoner. Again, he is deconstructed over the course of the novel from leet poisoner stereotype to self-deluding fool whose dedication to science and maxims of caution offer no protection against the cruel whimsicality of the world in which he lives.

He was beyond doubt the greatest poisoner ever and had become, indisputably, a great man of history. How it galled him that he could never truly share his grand achievement with the world, never enjoy the adulation his triumph undoubtedly deserved. Oh, if the doubting headmaster of the orphanage could have only witnessed this happy day, he would have been forced to concede that Castor Morveer was indeed prize-winning material. If his wife could have seen it, she would have finally understood him and never complained about his unusual habits!

Yes, he’s a messed up little bunny and so utterly broken, hopeless and thwarted it’s hard not to feel a certain pity for him although he’s also a masterpiece of irritation. Although they have little in common on the surface, he reminded me a great deal of Jezel in the sense that both are characters who exist to have their illusions of themselves utterly shattered. As with Jezel, the presentation of Morveer made me faintly uncomfortable, not so much because of who he was or what happened to him, but because of an ill-defined extra-textual element. I remember finding Jezel as much as the victim of authorial malice as anything and, again, I rather felt that Abercrombie wanted to condemn Morveer for his hypocrisy. This is pure speculation of the kind that would get me thrown out of any lit class in the land, but I think one of Abercrombie’s personal bugbears (and one he shares with Dan, actually) is “people who are more shit than they think they are” and that he takes a grim pleasure in having such people come face to face with irrefutable evidence of their own shitness (there’s even a brief cameo from Jezel, suitably cowed). Unfortunately it’s very difficult to communicate the subtleties of that effectively, and the result is characters like Jezel and Morveer, who come face to face with their own shitness primarily because the author wants to show it to them.

They are presented as characters whose self-perceptions are flawed but they are flawed primarily insofar as they differ from the author’s. The result of this is to highlight their artificiality in that you’re always aware of them as an authorial creations, and the only possible perspective you can take is the one prescribed by the author. I didn’t like Jezel but I did sympathise with him greatly (I think, perhaps, his shitness resonated with my shitness), but I felt there was no room for that within the text, because the author had nothing but contempt for him. Essentially, when constructing self-deluding characters, there must be a distinction drawn between “this character thinks they’re great but they’re not necessarily as great as they think they are” and “this character thinks he’s awesome, I (the author) think they’re a dick, therefore they’re a dick.” And that, for me, is the problem with Abercrombie’s Jezel/Morveer archetypes.

There’s something Chaucerian about Abercrombie’s work, not just in a shared relish of jokes about poo, but in the sense that the primary virtue espoused by both writers is not necessarily moral good but a kind of animalistic cleverness. Rewards, such as they are, come to those who are smart enough to know when they are beaten (Glokta) and those with the wit to see themselves as they truly are (Cosca). For everybody else, there is merely destruction, self-destruction and death, as they become helpless slaves to the cruelty of others, their own needs and the vagaries of fate.

There’s a lot to like about Best Served Cold. A well designed world, snappy dialogue, some great writing, colourful characters and lashings of ultraviolence. It bogs down a little about 3/5s of the way through but finishes nicely. But there’s also a certain sense that Abercrombie may be a one-trick pony. It’s set in the same world, it has a similar approach, similar characters and, hell, even the same damn cover. It has the comparable strengths and weaknesses of The First Law Trilogy, except the weaknesses bothered me less and the strengths seemed more pronounced. In short, if Joe Abercrombie is a one trick pony, it’ll be a fucking stallion by the time he’s done.Themes:

Books

,

Joe Abercrombie

,

Sci-fi / Fantasy

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http://fintinobrien.livejournal.com/

at 21:32 on 2009-07-07I've always had a certain fondness for fantasy settings, despite hating most fantasy tropes with a passion, so it sounds like I should like Abercrombie. Would you recommend starting with this or the First Law trilogy?

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Wardog

at 23:05 on 2009-07-07Oh gosh, that's a rather difficult question actually. Given what you've said about your attitude fantasy, I think you might really dig Abercrombie - I know I do, when I'm not feeling ambivalent :) This has the benefit of being a one-shot so it's less of an investment but ... it's set in the same world as The First Trilogy and it does have characters and settings in common. I don't think it would necessarily interfere with your enjoyment of the book but it might be slightly bewildered.

I'd actually start with The Blade Itself - firstly it's in paperback (hehe) but I remember thinking it was one of the most interesting, exciting fantasy books I'd ever read when I began it. And even thought I'm personally not sure the second and third books live up to the potential of the first, at least you'll know whether his style grabs you. Also I think his grip on his characters is better in The First Law trilogy, maybe just because he has more time to establish them.

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http://fintinobrien.livejournal.com/

at 20:51 on 2009-07-08I was thinking I could just flip a coin, but you make a good case for The Blade Itself. (Actually, you had me at "it's in paperback.") :)

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Michal

at 03:10 on 2011-07-30I'll always remember this book as "that one with the most disappointing sword fight ever." (I'm sure you remember the one)

This final, slightly tortured review of Joe Abercrombie's The First Law Trilogy has left me in a bit of a quandary. The fact is I stayed up until two in the morning to finish it so it's certainly well-written, absorbing and blissfully pacey for the conclusion of a fantasy epic but, now that I'm done, I genuinely don't know what I think about it. Consequently this article will be less of a review than an extended pondering (with attendant rampant spoilering, for them as care).

Safe Reviewish Bits:

Last Argument of Kings feels for the most part like a better book than Before They Are Hanged, in that arguably less of it is absolutely pointless (please note we will be returning to that use of arguably' later). As ever, Abercrombie's dialogue is snappy, his action scenes are by far his greatest strength and if you were interested enough in his characters in book one you'll be equally interested in them now (Inquisitor Glokta still rocks my world). Although I haven't brought the Reading Canary to bear on this trilogy it's definitely safe to say that Last Argument of Kings isn't at all toxic and, quite frankly, if you've got this far into the series you'll probably be reading it anyway.

Discussion: Massive spoilers ahoy!

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Violence (Yet Again)

As I have previously discussed at some length,

my review

of The Blade Itself was considerably gushier than

my review

of Before They Are Hanged, mainly because, in my general enthusiasm for the first book, I got all carried away about what I thought it was trying to say. In particular, TBI contains a lot of violence and amounts to quite a thoughtful exploration of the affect of violence on both individuals and the society they inhabit. Violence seems to be very much portrayed as an integral part of the world and, by extraction, as an integral part human beings. However, everyone is lessened by the violence which affects them and in which they participate: Glokta is profoundly broken, spiritually, emotionally and physically, by his experiences at the hands of the Gurkish; Logen, the survivor of incalculable battles, has nothing and nobody left to fight for; Colonel West ruins his relationship with his sister and his own self-respect by striking her; Ardee West is, herself, dealing with the consequences of her father's mistreatment. Throughout the first book, the reader is presented with different types of violence across a whole range of scales, from the very personal (West and his sister), to the politically necessary (Glokta's work for the inquisition), from public spectacle (Jezel's duel) to the vast and inconceivable destruction of the battlefield, and it all comes together really nicely to present a coherent and meaningful exploration of the subject. I'm not going to start bandying around terms like "transcends genre" but it does provide considerable depth and scope to the novel.

However, as the books progress this exploration becomes increasingly disjointed. Specifically, in TBI itself, the effect of violence on those it touches is always negative. Glokta, for example, draws no validation or illumination from his job; even the possibility of satisfaction in a task completed is denied to him by his constant question: "why do I do this?" Yet, in BTAH Jezel gets hit in the face with a mace and this improves his character immeasurably. Although we see in Last Argument of Kings that he is not so very different from the man he used to be before he got dragged on a Pointless Quest of Doom and hit in the face with a mace - he is still vain and selfish and foolish. However, the important thing is that he is different - he's not a saint or a hero, and he still makes mistakes and deludes himself as to his own merits, but he is undeniably a noticeably better man than he used to be. This strikes me as a rather peculiar message since the implication of it seems to be that certain types of people just need a good ol' mace in face.

Furthermore, TBI presents violence as embedded just as much in human beings themselves as in the culture to which they belong. Glokta is never shown as some kind of alien monster, detached from the rest of humanity by the acts he is capable of committing (or by the horrors that were visited upon him): very specifically he serves as a dark reflection of the person Jezel could so very easily become. Essentially, a possible Glokta lurks inside us all. However, in books 2 and 3, acts of extreme violence seem to become narratively "detached" from the characters who commit them. For example, when West kills the Crown Prince, it is described like this:

West had never in his life felt so calm, so sober, so sure of himself. He chose to do it. His right arm jerked out and his open palm thumped against Ladisla's chest.

Although the text emphasises that West chooses to murder Ladisla, there seems to be a gap between that decision and the physical act of pushing Ladisla off a cliff. West chooses. His arm commits the murder. Equally he does not murder Ladisla, a whole person, he connects only with a part of him (his chest). The whole scene creates an eerie impression of distance and detachment which has the effect of separating West from the act and consequently responsibility for it.

Logen is equally problematic for me. Although on the surface he's the "nicest" of Abercrombie's protagonists, being significantly less self-absorbed than most of them, it seems as if Abercrombie would like us to forget just how morally dubious he really is. For the flawed moral centre of an otherwise amoral book this might work but, by halfway through BTAH, while Logen is dispensing homespun wisdom (in rather lengthy speeches, I have to say), nursing the injured Jezel and bonking the demon chick, his mass-murdering instinct has been located in a force he, and the text, calls The Bloody Nine. I am relieved to note that this isn't literally an external force and works more as an extended metaphor for Logen's barbarian bloodlust; however it is nevertheless portrayed in such a fashion that, again, serves to distance Logen's acts from Logen himself. For example, there's a scene in BTAH where the Pointless Quest Party sit around the campfire discussing their mistakes and Logen contributes this:

When I was fourteen, I think, I argued with a friend. Can't even remember what about. I remember being angry. I remember he hit me. Then I was looking at my hands ... I'd strangled him. Good and dead. I didn't remember doing it, but there was only me there and I had his blood under my nails ... few years later, I nearly killed my father .... There came one winter that I didn't know who I was was, or what I was doing most of the time. Sometimes I'd see it happening, but I couldn't change it.

Arguably this can be seen as Logen having self-consciously divorced himself from his own worst side (or, to universalise it, perhaps it's some kind of address to the way violence changes all those who partake in it, separating them from themselves) but all of Logen's major fights use this split-perspective ('"Yes!" he hissed, and Logen laughed, and the Bloody-Nine laughed, together' - Last Argument of Kings) which means that it never really feels like Logen fighting, any more than it really changes your opinion of Logen to learn that he killed his best friend and nearly killed his own father. These aspects of his character don't feel real because we are never really allowed to see the truth and the reality of them. The Logen the reader knows, and cares for, is the Logen who tenderly looks after the whinging Jezel and who takes the time to penetrate (bad choice of word) Ferro's spiky exterior, not the rampant psychopath all other warriors fear.

There's an intriguing exchange between Logen and Jezel that occurs near the end of Last Argument of Kings:

"Alright. Tell me something, then. Am I ..." He struggled to find the right words. "Am I ... an evil man?" "You?" Jezel stared at him, confused. "You're the best man I know."

This confused me because I wasn't sure how I was meant to take it. Jezel is, of course, quite stupid and not especially perceptive so I doubt readers are meant to lend much credence to anything he says. Is this, then, a further indictment of Jezel's foolishness - i.e. that he believes a mass-murdering, psychotic barbarian is the best man he knows? Or is it an indictment of the whole society i.e. that a mass-murdering, psychotic barbarian amounts to a good man in such an evil world. I mean, looking at it objectively, Logen is an evil man: his confession at the fireside reveals he has murdered people he ostensibly cared about for the pettiest of reasons. But given the fact that Logen is, as I have said, the most obviously sympathetic and the most obviously "nice" of the all the characters in The First Law Trilogy (I mean, he occasionally acts on behalf of other people, not just for his own survival and advancement), I do believe we are perhaps meant to take this statement from Jezel at face value.

Of course the more I dwell on it, the more I try to infuse it with meaning. Noticeably, Logen asks if he is an evil man (which is a question about morality) and Jezel replies that he is "the best man" he knows (which is a value judgement), not quite answering the question. However, if Abercombie is going to make subtle points about the way morals and merit interact he shouldn't be putting them in the mouth of a character for whom he obviously feels nothing but contempt.

This is the sort of meaningless inconsistency that plagues me throughout The First Law Trilogyand finds its truest expression in:

Jezel

By the time I finished Last Argument of Kings, I couldn't quite shake the conviction that Jezel was the victim of authorial malice. The three main characters in The First Law Trilogy are: an ex-golden boy torture victim turned torturer, a mass murdering psychotic barbarian and Jezel who, well, is a bit selfish and a bit shallow. Looking at it objectively, although he's not necessarily the most sympathetic of them (he's petty, he whinges, he's foolish and cowardly) he's certainly the least morally objectionable. He very explicitly wants glory and adoration and is, by nature, more concerned with the appearance of things than truth of them: he doesn't necessarily behave in a noble or worthy fashion, but he still nevertheless wants to be perceived as being noble and worthy. He treats Ardee West quite badly but, arguably, not as badly as her own brother does. It's hard to like Jezel - because he has an exaggerated opinion of his own worth which is a profoundly unloveable trait - but, compared to the others, he's the least flawed. I think most people are a bit like Jezel, actually: self-interested, arrogant, cowardly and occasionally capable of being something more.

By the middle of the third book Bayez (more about this character later) has manipulated Jezel into a position whereby he gets elected King of the Union; the final section of the book shows him repelling an invading force and learning that being a figurehead King is a completely hollow experience. The reason, we learn, that Bayez decided to make Jezel King in order to stabilise the Union was because Jezel looked the part and he knew Jezel was cowardly and easy to manipulate:

"I know that you would [obey] because although I know that you are arrogant, ignorant and ungrateful, I know this also ... that you are a coward. Remember that."

Jezel's attempts to be a good King (changing the laws on taxation, for example, to make them fair for everyone, regardless of status) are met with hostility and his final attempt to break free from Bayez's influence ends with him snivelling on the floor because Bayez is The Most Powerful Person Like Evar:

Jezel knelt there, clinging to the curtains like a child to his mother. He thought about how happy he had once been and how little he had realised it ... never in his life had he felt so alone. Son of Kings? He had no one and nothing. He spluttered and sniffed. His vision grew blurry. He shook with hopeless sobs ... he wept with pain and fear, with shame and anger, with disappointment and helplessness. But Bayez had been right. He was a coward. So most of all he wept with relief.

The point, of course, is that there are no happy endings for the characters in The First Law Trilogy: what little contentment is available comes from compromise and all power comes with a price. This is all very cynical blah blah blah. Logen, however weary and disillusioned he is, gets to be King of the North. And provided he works for Bayez, Glokta gets fistfuls of power to wield, and also he gets Ardee West. I was actually very happy with this - bitter crippled torturer gets the girl, oh yes!

But Jezel, on the other hand, really does get completely screwed: even his beautiful new wife (who he married for political reasons, naturally) turns out to be a lesbian who Glokta eventually blackmails into doing her wifely duty. Regardless of his moral fibre (and, really, I don't expect the good to be rewarded and the evil punished - I am well aware that The First Law Trilogy are not those sort of books), perhaps it is because Jezel is a weaker personality than either Logen or Glokta that everything goes so horribly wrong for him. Or, perhaps, it is an ironic twist on his superficial nature and his hunger for glory. But, nevertheless, I do feel that Jezel's fate and the way the text invites us to view him are unbalanced when set against the other, equally and if not more so, objectionable characters.

The thing is, I don't think Jezel is as bad as Abercrombie seems to think he is. The text relentlessly shows us scenes of Jezel snivelling, being rubbish, feeling sorry for himself and being stupid and/or arrogant but he does occasionally rise above that and attempt to be a better man. In the first book, when the whole council chamber are cowed into silence by Bethod's messengers, Jezel speaks - despite his terror. He genuinely tries to learn from experiences on the Pointless Quest. And in Last Argument of Kings, when he becomes King, he genuinely attempts to embrace the responsibility of it, subjugating his personal desires for the good of the Kingdom (he puts Ardee aside in favour of a political union, yes this is partly because he is also quite shallow but that doesn't diminish the fact he does it) and trying make life better for all citizens in the union. When the city is under siege he rallies the people and holds the city together, even participating in the desperate fighting until Bayez rebukes him for endangering himself.

Jezel's default position might be self-absorbed cowardice, but he also has the capacity to be more than that. Although far too flawed (human?) to be a hero, the fact that he occasionally behaves heroically in spite of his nature and in spite of the world around him strikes me as positive. The fact that he doesn't defy either himself or his world to be more of a hero strikes me as realistic. I don't like Jezel because he's not likeable but I don't think he deserves the contempt with which the text seems to treat him. Perhaps I'm reading too much into this but I do get the sense that Abercrombie can conceive of merit in Glokta's bitterness, Logen's barbarism and West's rage but that he genuinely despises Jezel. I'm not saying that he deserves more than he gets but the text leaves him crying on the floor, cowed and humiliated, covered in his own vomit and other even less pleasant substances. His self-delusions have been utterly destroyed and the voices of Jezel, Bayez and the narrative itself blend in their final condemnation of his cowardice and worthlessness.

It's Deja Vu All Over Again

But the major reason I'm not sure how I feel about The First Law Trilogy is the overall progression of the plot. Despite the fantasy sag that afflicted it during BTAH it's generally well structured; unfortunately that structure is, quite self-consciously, a circle. This is, in fact, one of the Themes of The First Law Trilogy: history goes in cycles and, thus, by the end of the third book the world has pretty much been reset to the way it was before everything went wrong in the first book, except that the names of people in positions of authority have changed. This is even reflected on a minute scale, as the book ends with Glokta teaching the first person we see him torture in the first book how to torture someone else, deliberately perpetuating even his own personal tragedy.

Part of me thinks this is quite cool and interesting.

But part of me also resents the fact that I poured quite a lot of time and energy into reading a series of books full of happenings that were completely pointless and meaningless.

I know that pointlessness is the point but ... still.

I also feel quite bad because it makes me wonder if I am guilty of fantasy snobbery, as I probably wouldn't dare to whinge about this sort of stuff had it occurred in a literary novel and would, instead, likely go on about it being really deep and cynical, man.

Part of the problem, I think, lies in the fact that pretty much the entire action of the novels turns out to be controlled, if not directly orchestrated, by Bayez the Magician who is The Most Powerful Person Like Evar pretty much unto tedium. I don't know whether it's a consequence of getting old and grumpy (older and grumpier) or just because they're a shit and lazy plot device, but as the years pass I grow increasingly disillusioned with Master Manipulator characters. I felt pretty much the same way about Littlefinger in A Song of Ice and Fire. It just strikes me as a stupidly easy way to have seemingly disparate plot elements come together in precisely the way you want without having to trouble yourself too much with tricky issues like plausibility or characterisation - and the final outcome of it, no matter how seemingly complex the manoeuvring, always feels hollow to me.

Part of the point of The First Law Trilogy, I suppose, is that Bayez has managed to retain power over the centuries and is able to re-establish that power base over the course of the books because everyone is too focused on their own private goals and desires. They accept the compromises Bayez offers because it is less risky than opposing him and concentrated opposition would require unity and trust and putting aside self-interest in favour of communal benefit.

And although this is, I suppose, moderately interesting and The First Law Trilogy is well-written enough to be enjoyable reading ... I nevertheless feel too ambivalent about its flaws and inconsistencies to be able to decide whether I would actually recommend it.Themes:

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Arthur B

at 14:21 on 2008-07-12I have to say that I don't much like cyclical stories either - or rather, I don't like it when they are a perfect circle rather than a spiral, if you see what I mean: I can accept "things are much the same, only a little better" or "things are much the same, only a little worse", but if you tell me "things are basically exactly the same and matters haven't really progressed or regressed at all" you've wasted my damn time.

The worst example I can think of this in SF/fantasy is

Dhalgren

by Samuel Delaney, which granted inspired Bowie's

Diamond Dogs

but is in itself an entirely pointless novel. It's set in this post-apocalyptic city where people live shallow, pointless lives because there's nothing left to do or achieve, and it does a remarkable job of evoking the crushing boredom of such a society. Which, of course, makes it a complete chore to read.

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Wardog

at 13:56 on 2008-07-16Hmmm...the problem is I'm genuinely not sure whether I'm being unfair to it. I mean it all comes together in quite a satisfying way and the fact that everything gets re-established pretty much the way it was before does make sense in the context of the book, and it has a suitably cynical conclusion to a cynical trilogy. But ... feh ... it just doesn't *feel* massively satisfying.

Thank you for reading epic post of epic :) I'm grateful!

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Joe W

at 15:49 on 2008-07-16I'd agree that the book's conclusion doesn't really satisfy and I at least partially share your ambivalence. I sought of feel that I am a reluctant participant in Abercrombie's experiment in writing- one can sse what he's done, and why he's done it, but one's method of appreciating of the piece becomes that of detached analysis rather than aesthetic enjoyment. One closes the book and thinks 'Hmmm...interesting choice.' rather than just basking in the contented glow of a story completed.

Or maybe that's just me.

In any case I think I'd still recommend the series myself; it was an enjoyable read and the characterisation is different enough from generic fantasy fare to feel fresh, particularly if one blitzes through the series in one go.

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Wardog

at 23:47 on 2008-07-16Yes, I think you're absolutely right, it's possible to take a sort of detached intellectual satisfaction in the conclusion but it doesn't exactly feel like you've had a pleasurable experience. I think for this very reason I'd feel hesitant about recommending; Dan, I'm sure, would lose all patience with it.

Just out of curiosity, what did you think of Jezel?

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Joe W

at 09:56 on 2008-07-17I minded what happened to Jezel a lot less than you. Yes he got shit all over by Bayaz, but that scene for me was less 'Jezel can suck it' and more 'what would happen if Gandalf was a total prick'.

I don't mind that Jezel is a coward (understandably so in the face of a magical compulsion, and someone who can turn him into bloody chunks with a thought). It was enough for me that he had become someone who wanted to be a good man even if he lacked the courage to follow through; it would have been out of tone with the rest of the series for him to be heroic. Besides that I quite liked the idea of him and Glokta, quietly scheming behind Bayaz's back to do good deeds. A conspiracy of fluffiness.

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James D

at 21:53 on 2012-05-07Kyra, I enjoyed your article and agreed with a number of things you said, but I disagree with some others. Not sharply, more that I just interpreted things somewhat differently. However, I had to take issue with this bit:

Logen, however weary and disillusioned he is, gets to be King of the North.

He pretty clearly doesn't; he's summarily ousted by Black Dow and probably ends up the worst out of all the main characters; he's back where he started at the beginning, a fleeing animal who doesn't even know where his next meal is coming from, except now all of his companions are dead except for the Dogman, who is hundreds of miles away. Jezel's position, while not exactly great, is much much better than that.

It seems to me that the point Abercrombie was making in the end with Jezel's suffering is that in that kind of world, a person in power who tries to be too magnanimous is bound to get smacked down by the other powers that be, because magnanimity rocks the boat too much. If he had been completely selfish and just shut up and contented himself with being king, as Glokta more or less does with his position, Jezel would have had an unequivocally happy ending. But he seemed to realize at the end that the glory and respect he wanted were hollow and decided to use his power to dismantle the system, which of course Bayaz wasn't cool with.

Still high from

my astonishingly gushy review

of Joe Abercrombie's first book, The Blade Itself, I recently embarked upon part two of the trilogy, Before They Are Hanged. If nothing else, it's an object lesson in why one shouldn't bandy the phrase "the best fantasy I've read" about without due care and attention. In short, then, the bad news is that The First Law Trilogy is not going to be the, ahem, fantasy masterpiece I thought it was; nor is it a cunning subversion of the genre or a profound meditation on the nature of the violence or any of the other silly silly things I tried to claim it was. In good, news, however, it's still okay. Well, better than average at least.

Relatively Spoiler-Free Comments

Following on at a fair pace from the events of the first book, Before They Are Hanged basically devolves into three probably connected but currently non-overlapping plot threads: you have Inquisitor Glokta fortifying Dagoska against the impending Gurkish Invasion, you have Colonel West on the frontlines of the war between the Union Forces and the Northmen and you have Bayez The Probably Batshit First Of Magi and his adventuring party (including the feckless swordsman Jezel and the thinking man's barbarian Logen Ninefingers) off on a quest for Generic Fantasy Artefact TM. All of Abercrombie's strengths are present: solidly drawn, generally morally interesting characters, crisp, sharp dialogue, exceptionally clear and vivid action sequences and a reasonable command of plotting and pacing (I was genuinely impressed when the war actually kicked off on page 187). Unfortunately, his weaknesses are also more apparent in this second outing.

Specifically, what seemed intriguingly and comfortingly generic the first time round now seems merely generically generic - the Traditional Fantasy Quest Plot, for example. It's engagingly written but it's still by far and away the least interesting third of the book. Subtleties of morality and characterisation also seem to have been lost: Jezel's redemption arc via a mace in the face is both abrupt and unconvincing; Colonel West, who was a minor player in the first book takes a more central role here but his self-disgust and his lack of self-awareness are portrayed rather clumsily, and Logen seems to have become the book's moral mouthpiece, a role which doesn't suit him and actually makes him come across as the oddest Mary Sue ever to grace the pages of fantasy fiction. Whereas all the other characters are just as much the sum of their flaws as their virtues, in Before They Are Hanged, it rapidly becomes apparent (and without giving too much away) that Logen's flaws, like his capacity for violence and destruction, are external to him rather than integral: this unbalances his character when set against the others, as well as making him significantly less interesting.

At least the crippled inquisitor, Glokta, remains as cool as ever. He's such a wonderful character that the book is worth reading for him alone.

In non-spoilerful conclusion, then, Before They Are Hanged is an above-average fantasy novel. To my mind it doesn't quite live up to the potential of the first but then there's a high probability I read things into The Blade Itself that weren't actually there at all. Nevertheless, it remains for the most part a well-written, well-structured and well-paced read that doesn't suffer too badly from fantasy-trilogy sag. It's won't change your life but it will pass the time effectively and competently, and Abercrombie has a real knack for action so expect some impressively bloody battles.

However, I do have some quite serious concerns / niggles that cannot be discussed without:

Massive Big Honking Spoilers

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As I mentioned earlier in this review, I felt that the characterisation suffered from being less nuanced than in The Blade Itself and this also applies to the book's depiction of morality. Specifically, what I really liked about The Blade Itself was its portrayal of violence. It's a typical low fantasy world so horrible things happen to semi-horrible people all the time and the book did a wonderful job of evoking the reality of that kind of society and that kind of violence. It was never gratuitously in your face about it but it was something Abercrombie did really very vividly. The Blade Itself seemed to be saying that a will towards power, violence and destruction is very much a natural part of being human - even the title, which I believe is a re-working of a quote from Homer which goes something like "the presence of weapons themselves is an encouragement to use them" seems to be concerned with the articulation of this idea. What made Logen so intriguing a character in such a world was that, as a brutal killer, he had essentially come full circle. The ultimate survivalist had become the ultimate moralist: a man who fought no longer for survival but for what he believed was right. However, in Before They Are Hanged, violence is portrayed - deliberately or not - as something very much outside and closed off from ordinary human experience: in extremis, West basically goes nuts and bites someone's nose off, Logen's barbarism is located in a spirit that possess him not within his own nature and Glotka, of course, continues to helplessly do unto others what was done to him.

I know we end up talking about rape a lot here but there's a really annoying nearly-rape in Before They Are Hanged that also ties into my concerns about the book's wavering moral compass. West is sent out to the front lines with the Crown Prince and an army of starving peasantry, where it is hoped the Prince can feel important and gather glory without ever actually encountering the reality of war. Needless to say, he's a complete waste of space and ends up taking the ragged army of ill-equipped and untrained peasants out to meet the Northman and everybody gets horrifically slaughtered, except West, the Prince, a random blacksmith chick and a small retinue of Northmen trying to oppose their war-mongering King. Then there's a lot of trudging around in cold trying to get the Prince to safety, during which time the Prince continues to be a complete waste of space in every conceivable way, showing no gratitude for those who are risking their lives to protect him or the thousands he just sent off to their deaths. Finally, West catches him in the act of trying to rape the random blacksmith chick, flips out and throws him off a cliff. Now, don't get me wrong. Rape is a terrible terrible thing. But the waste-of-space Crown Prince is also responsible for the deaths of literally thousands of people: surely that was the time to shove him off a cliff?

You can argue that Abercrombie is making an interesting point regarding the personal versus the political and that it is the small acts that affect us that individuals that spur us into action, rather than the huge acts that destroy the lives of thousands. But truthfully it just seems like typical fantasy novel inconsistency to me, and the incident says more about Abercrombie as a writer than about West as a character. As I have already written about at length in various places on this site, I hate the fact that fantasy writers tend to use rape as some kind of moral shorthand. In this instance (as in others), I very strongly felt that throwing out a casual rape scene as a way to convince us the Crown Prince really is as bad as we think he is, merely lessened the impact of his previous atrocities and implies an unhelpful moral equivalence I don't mean to get all Jeremy Bentham about it but surely Abercrombie is not trying to get us to weigh the attempted rape of one woman against the lives of thousands of peasants.

My final irritation has nothing to do with morals, merely time-wasting. One of the three plotlines, as I have mentioned, is a Generic Fantasy Quest. However, when the party arrives at its destination the Generic Fantasy Object they are seeking is conspicuous by its absence. This naturally ends the book on a note of self-conscious anti-climax. Although this is ... I suppose ... interesting in theory it is, in practice, as you might expect, anticlimactic i.e. massively unsatisfying. I read pretty quickly but nevertheless Joe Abercrombie essentially just made me about 200 hundred pages for absolutely nothing. It seems there's only one thing worse than a Generic Fantasy Quest Plot and that's a completely pointless Generic Fantasy Quest Plot. Grrr. I'm sure it'll make sense once placed in the context of the final novel but that doesn't excuse the fact that it renders a third of this one hollow.Themes:

Books

,

Joe Abercrombie

,

Sci-fi / Fantasy

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Joe W

at 10:28 on 2008-06-19I'm looking forward to your analysis of the last book (which I can lend you, if you want)

SPOILERS of Before They Are Hanged BELOW

I share a lot of your criticisms about this book- in particular I also disliked the resolution of the Generic Fantasy Quest Plot.

I'm in two minds about Ladisla's death. I don't mind West killing him for the rape attempt; I can quite happily see it as the straw that broke the camel's back. I can quite easily see why you'd kill a man for that, but not for willful stupidity that leads to thousands of deaths. After all getting to do the latter is one of the traditional perks of being royalty- it was idiotic but not actively malicious.

What I didn't like was how much of a caricature Ladisla was- I could have lived with him as simply being utterly crap, but the rape attempt took him straight from crap into wilfully evil. I'd expected some sort of twist to the character and then was disappointed when it panned out just as I'd expect in any other book.

I will note in reference to one of your other points. that I don't think the Bloody-Nine is a spirit external to Logen; I think that like West he goes batshit in a fight- it's just that Logen tries so hard to divorce himself from the berserker that he no longer even self-identifies in that state.

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Dan H

at 13:52 on 2008-06-19

What I didn't like was how much of a caricature Ladisla was- I could have lived with him as simply being utterly crap, but the rape attempt took him straight from crap into wilfully evil.

That's usually my problem with the Obligatory Fantasy Rape Scenes. It's so often used as evidence that a particular character is zomg teh evil. See my recent article on /Age of the Five/.

As for the Bloody-Nine, I've only read the first book, and I was certainly *concerned* that there was going to be a "big reveal" to the effect that Logan was effectively controlled by an external spirit. If it remains ambiguous throughout all three books, then that's a lot better than I was expecting.

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Wardog

at 15:02 on 2008-06-19I do actually have The Last Argument of Kings - I was so passionately in love with TBI that I rushed out and bought both sequels. I'm giving myself a break to try and get over the fact that they're not what I thought they were and enjoy them for what they actually are - but I'll certainly be embarking it upon it in the next couple of weeks. But thank you kindly for the offer.

I know what you mean about Ladisla; everything about the character, and the way he's dealt with, annoys me. Being idiotic is, as you say, a traditional perk of being royalty BUT it's like he's deliberately set up so that you want somebody (probably West) to just freak out and kill the guy. I remember thinking to myself as I was reading the bit where West literally begs him not to throw away probably the war and all of those lives, "kill him, West, just kill him now." And, of course, he doesn't. He just grits his teeth and respects the institution of the monarch as, living in a heredity monarchy, you probably would. So that's why the rape-triggered freak out irritates me particularly. But, yes, you're right - it's also just depressing to have a cardboard cutout in a world otherwise by populated by quite interestingly flawed people. Even Arch Lector Sult - who is basically hand-rubbingly evil from toes to nose - is *interesting*.

About Logen ... mmm...I'm not sure. Perhaps you're right that it's just a psychological trick he's developed to protect himself from the truth of what he really is but it seems to me that the narrative seems to hinting otherwise. I mean, there's that scene where they're all sitting round the campfire confessing their mistakes (Bayaz talks about his love his master's daughter and all that stuff) and Logen talks about the time he killed his best friend and didn't remember doing it, and gives a long list of similar incidents. Also when the narrative describes Logen in extreme beserker mode it does differentiate between Logen and this other force, The Bloody Nine. Maybe you're right and it's just a rhetorical trick and you probably know since you've read the last book but even if it is just a metaphor it nevertheless isolates Logen's violent identity as something other to who he really is...

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Arthur B

at 12:31 on 2011-04-11Oh dear. I just tried to read this one and failed horribly. Maybe it's just that I left it over a year since reading the previous one - but then again, they weren't published that close to each other, were they? - but it failed to grab me early on. I tried to give it a fair chance and told myself I'd read up to page 100 and see if it had grown on me by that point, but it turned out to be a serious struggle to force myself to even get as far as page 50, so I gave up.

I think part of the problem was how utterly transparent Abercrombie is in his use of cliches and cheap shots here, combined with how shallow and simplistic the situations he constructs is.

The major example in the section I've picked out: you've got West briefing the generals and the Crown Prince on the situation in Angland, and the prince and both generals are all such over-the-top cartoons that West might as well have been briefing General Stickupthearse, General Flouncey-Dandy, and Crown Prince Totalfuckingdisaster, with Marshall Basicallyagoodsort looking on approvingly. The characterisation is so heavy-handed that you can't really take anything away from it beyond "these are the characters you are supposed to like, these are the characters you are supposed to hate."

I didn't even get to anything about Bayaz's wizardy quest, and I had this sudden epiphany where I realised that I had completely ceased to care about said quest. I didn't care about any of the characters I remembered from the last book at all. Maybe that's a consequence of leaving it so long to read book 2, or maybe that's why I left it so long in the first place: I just didn't

care