Monthly Archives: May 2011

give your hero autonomy, make a villain

This thought was groundbreaking stuff when I finally got there, so stick with me as I reason my way to it.

A compelling criticism of the bodice-ripping sex-scenes of 80s romance novels is that women have no autonomy – and no responsibility. They get to have the sex they truly desire, without having to chose it, or ask for it, or acknowledge that they want it.

(My favourite place this is argued is in the delicious Consuming Passions, which the BBC made to celebrate 100 years of Mills & Boon. I’ve added the trailer for your enjoyment – that’s just the kind of host I am.)

The romance genre has, for the most part, dealt with this. Modern heroines have to face themselves and their desires – they have to look them head-on and have the courage to choose them – before they get their happy ending.

I recently watched a fantastic TED video, the antidote to apathy (see below), and one of the speaker’s points went ping in my head. He says:

“Heroes are chosen. There’s a prophecy. Someone came up to them and said, ‘You have to save the world’ and then someone goes off and saves the world, because they’ve been told to, with a few people tagging along. This helps me understand why a lot of people have trouble seeing themselves as leaders, because it sends all the wrong messages about what leadership is about…As long as we’re teaching our kids that heroism starts when someone scratches a mark on your forehead, or someone tells you that you’re part of a prophecy, they’re missing the most important characteristic of leadership, which is that it comes from within, it’s about following your own dreams uninvited, and then working with others to make those dreams come true.”

I remembered that old criticism of romance, and came to this conclusion: Romance has moved on, but the Hero Story hasn’t.

Cat and I started to talk about this. What would a fantasy epic look like if the hero wasn’t “chosen” (i.e. got to have his epic destiny without any autonomy or responsibility)? What if some farm boy (because they always are farm boys, right?) looked around himself and decided to do something about what he saw; to act autonomously, and to be responsible for what he caused?

The first thing that occurred to us was: They wouldn’t get away with nearly so much. What if Harry Potter was just any other kid, but he’d decided to stand up to You-Know-Who. In the process he gets Cedric killed and cuts up Malfoy. How much more culpable would he look if he alone was responsible for those actions, and not some Destiny that’s marked him since he was a baby?

Would he still be a hero?

Which is where we got to thinking: Villains are the characters who act autonomously. They look at a situation, make their own decisions, and are held responsible for their actions.

The movie Thor is the perfect example. Thor kicks off a war with the gods’ ancient enemies and gets cast down to Earth as part of his father’s masterplan. He is “chosen” for great things. Loki creates the only scenario where he can kill the king of their enemies and stop his irresponsible brother from sitting on the throne, but is cast out forever, because he is not “chosen”. He is responsible for his own actions.

So now I’m unbearably curious: Is it possible to have an autonomous hero who doesn’t turn into a villain?

reading like Sherlock Holmes

Considering that 80 percent of what I read is historical romance, it may sound a bit odd that I have no inclination whatsoever to read “historical fiction”. It really doesn’t appeal to me. Maybe because real historical figures, even re-imagined, are fixed. And history is so rarely kind.

But I’ve been reading The Golden Mean by Annabel Lyon and loving the socks off it. It’s narrated by Aristotle and covers the years he tutored Alexander (The Great). The writing is pared back but still somehow luscious, and startling, and her Alexander is hugely compelling.

There’s one particular passage I wanted to mention, because it made me work as a reader in a way that challenged and flattered me. It made me pick the clues out, become a detective of the narrative, work to understand what was happening just under the surface.

Here is the passage (a young Aristotle is finishing his first day with his drunken tutor):

“Tomorrow you might even take off your cloak.” He had lit one or two more lamps and woken the fire, and there was a simmering pot now, beans from the smell, hanging from a peg above the flames. I had been oblivious to everything.

On my way out, he handed me a coin from the pouch I had given him. “If there’s a boy on the street out there, give him this and tell him Illaeus is hungry. A young one, mind you. Not if the voice has broken, like yours.”

In the darkening street I found a boy my brother’s age playing a game on the ground with pebbles, tossing them into piles and allotting himself more pebbles as prizes when he scored. “Do you know Illaeus, who lives in that house?” I asked, pointing.

He held out his hand. I gave him the coin and walked away, back up the long hill, without looking back.

I am too naive to be a writer

I’ve just spent way too much of my evening watching documentaries on the ABC. I feel…horrified. Like I was an innocent until now.

I have just realised documentaries are a smoke screen – the dry, scientific “we don’t have a bias these are just the facts” style conceals their true function. Documentaries are the freakshows of the modern day. They’re where we go to marvel at the extremities of the human.

And if you’re looking for deeply passionate, emotionally conflicted characters, it’s an eye opener.

A short asian man considers having his leg bones drilled, broken and screwed back together to add a couple of inches to his height. When he concluded his interview, and he said that the dream of changing his height was over but the dream of being strong and resilient and successful had just begun, I wanted to cheer.

A middle-aged white teacher goes into a racial experiment and comes out saying “I had nothing to learn going in – my opinions didn’t change at all. I am passionate about these things already.” In the tea break she’s telling another woman about the black, white and half-caste children she teaches. “One girl,” she says, “stunning girl – she fell down and grazed her cheek in the playground, and I have to admit I was a bit surprised that the skin was pink underneath. I suppose I thought it would be black.”

And then – hear my heart break – the mothers who enter their daughters in beauty pageants. Who fill their daughters’ mouths with words and claim, with all the goodwill in the world, that God has gifted their daughters with a beautiful face and modelling talent so it would be wasteful not to pursue this. Without a word for their child’s inner qualities, or any sense that they are enough just as they are – that they are learning and growing and will become things you couldn’t even dream of yet. All this in the child’s hearing, mind you.

And you watch the child disappear right before their parents’ adoring gaze, because they simply aren’t being seen at all.

Then you scrape the surface of the parents’ stories…

And you realise how little you really know about people, and what drives them, and what they’re capable of. And what they inflict on each other, in the name of love.

And then you realise it’s time for bed.

my adoration of E M Forster has a new context

I just had quite a delicious, enlightening moment.

My sister recently put out a call for book recommendations, “Beautiful novels, not too heavy”. People responded, to my mystification, with suggestions like White Oleander and Love in the Time of Cholera. Guess they didn’t get the “not too heavy” caveat.

I recommended Room With a View, by E M Forster, which has always been one of my favourite books. We were just skyping, so I decided to get it out and read the blurb to her.

Reading it was like getting struck on the head, if my head was a bell. If I had to condense my ultimate romance premise – the heart of romance I’m always trying to find as I write – this would be it:

On her first day in Florence, Miss Lucy Honeychurch, a well-bred tourist from Surrey, meets a passionate young Englishman in her pension who soon introduces her to an honest and reckless new outlook on life. Though Lucy attempts to maintain her safe facade and becomes engaged to an English gentleman with an overdeveloped intellect and an underdeveloped heart, the desires she has held in check for so long come unbound, bringing her face to face with the disorienting possibility of a life free from paralysing precaution.

no means yes: part I

I’ve just read the first two of Anne Stuart‘s House of Rohan trilogy, and it’s been a weird, tug-o-war experience.

Her writing is compulsively readable. She writes destitution to perfection, and her heroes are tortured and depraved without us ever seeing them do anything too awful. Except to their heroines, that is.

And here’s the the crux of my dilemma. These heroes know their heroines’ minds better than their heroines do – knowing that they mean yes when they say no, for example.

They run their heroines down like prey and seduce them out of their virginal dishonesty (“I don’t want you”). They’re sadistic and manipulative and they call their heroines poppet, child, precious. These books read like psychological thrillers, and the heroines’ will is worn away piece by piece until the endings resound with a hollow, Stockholm-sydrome happy ending. It’s terrifying.

The more so because the heroines are written as tough. They will try anything they can to escape.

This is my secondary beef with the books – the characters are so inconsistent they sometimes drive me to a controlled rage. They’re desperately in love with their hero – and they’re desperate to escape him. They will never sell themselves, even if it’s the difference between starving and living – they will do anything to survive, even if it means giving up their honour.

You get the idea. Rage.

This lack of integrity is what allows her heroes to get away with it. Charlotte quite definitely tells Adrian no, but he decides to turn that into a yes. At the end of the book, when she’s acquitting him of blame, she says, “I never told you no.” Er, yes, she did. But by having the characters able to yoyo between extreme frames of mind, Anne Stuart can tell us they accept something, and there’s nothing we can do about it.

Except scream “Run!” in the confines of our own minds.

In my last post I wrote about men being able to stand up to women and say “You’re being dishonest. This is not how I deserve to be treated”. This is the other side of that fine line.

men are lovely

the other night me and special k got into one of those arguments. You know, the ones about gender that neither of you can win, that hit a deep, defensive, emotional vein that almost has nothing to do with you at all. I pointed out that the statistics about what women earn and the kinds of positions they hold in organisations is mirrored in miniature in his shop. He quoted “What are little girls made of? Sugar and spice and all things nice. What are little boys made of? Frogs and snails and puppy-dogs tails” at me.

It didn’t seem to be going anywhere very good, and it seemed to be going there very fast. And then I realised there was something I’d never told him.

“You know what I love about romance novels?” I said. “Yes, they’re about women and what women can do, and want for themselves. But they absolutely adore men. They fight for what men can expect, who they can be without reprimand. You’ll often see a heroine manipulating her way around a hero, until the hero says Look at what you’re doing. That’s not okay.”

He was surprised. It brought the “discussion” to a friendly close.

There is a fine line here, between a father-figure man who is reprimanding a woman for acting outside of her role, and one human being calling another to account. But of course there’s a line. This is how real human relationships operate as well – in a series of contexts that we are reinventing all the time.

the book that cured all ills (ill-thoughts, at least)

Okay, I forgive Julie Anne Long everything. You’re in for another (much longer) rant, but at least this one’s almost all joy.

Yesterday I read the fifth book in the Pennyroyal Green series, What I Did For a Duke. I will use every adjective in my vocabulary (okay, I probably won’t, but superlatives will be thick on the ground, too) to try and express how much I loved this book.

It has been a long, long time since a historical romance got me like this.

Let’s get the premise out of the way first: The Duke of Moncrieffe has a bad reputation for serving revenge cold, even years after the fact. He has just found his fiancee in bed with Ian Eversea. He’s not happy. He’s also almost forty (this is often expressed in italics in the characters’ thoughts. I’m not entirely sure what the emphasis is getting at, but it feels cheeky, and I like it). He decides to seduce Ian’s youngest sister, then break her heart and leave her.

He just happens to catch her at a really bad time.

Genevieve’s best friend, Harry, has just told her that he plans to propose to her other best friend, Millicent. This breaks her heart rather severely, as she’d always assumed she would marry Harry. So when the Duke comes along, demanding her attention, she’s really not in the mood. She does everything she can to get rid of him, he does everything he can to get a response from her, and pretty soon they’re head-over-heels in fascination with each other.

The things I love about this book:

1. The Duke is an amazing hero. Ten out of ten.

He gradually unfolds as a character, so that we get to know him as Genevieve does. This is such a difficult, subtle piece of craft, and I applaud JAL for having the trust and patience to do it. He’s certainly magnetic right from the get-go, but he’s not an obvious choice. Characters are very often represented in this light, but only in-so-far as we’re told “He wasn’t an obvious choice” whilst seeing all the ways he obviously is. The slow reveal meant I could get to know him and fall in love with him piece by piece, too.

He’s also truly smart. The “hypothesis” of the book seems to be Experience Makes For Interesting People (you have to break eggs to make an omelet), and the Duke proves it every step of the way. He’s not just smart in the wordy way of Regency heroes – his conversation is challenging, and tough, and he doesn’t let up. He’s mature and experienced enough to push for answers even when Genevieve’s hugely reluctant, or embarrassed, or defensive. He allows those feelings to be present and demands something of her anyway. Which is how transformation really does happen, in my experience.

2. Genevieve is a gorgeous heroine – very much in the same vein as Beatrix Hathaway. A truly likeable heroine, which is a hard thing to pull off.

This is, in a sense, an ugly duckling story. Genevieve is “the quiet, sensible one” of the reckless Eversea family, but that’s not what she thinks she is, and that’s not what the Duke sees. But JAL – thank God! – never gave her a look-where-being-good-got-me,-I’m-going-to-do-something-crazy moment. No matter how well those moments are constructed, something always rings false about them to me. Genevieve never breaks character because she doesn’t perceive herself as others see her, so she continues to act according to her own nature – the difference being that she now has an audience and antagonist who also sees her truly. This is, again, fantastic writing.

3. The characters’ physicality is built over time as well, as an expression of how they come to see each other. One of my favourite moments in the whole book is when the Duke thinks: He’d never known a more clawing hunger for a woman’s body, and it shocked him, and he was clever enough to know it had only a little to do with her body.

Yes! Finally! I think so few romance writers think this connection through deeply enough – that all the heaving bosoms and luscious curves and pillow-like lips are an expression of attraction to a person, not a body.

4. I can’t say too much on this point without spoilers, and as I encourage all of you to read this book, I don’t want to indulge in those. All I’ll say is: JAL deals with the Big Misunderstanding that gets the plot rolling (i.e. the Duke is out to seduce Genevieve for his own, bad reasons) in such a brilliant way. She makes the BM work a lot harder than it would if she had dealt with it in a traditional “I’m keeping a secret that could destroy you” way.

What didn’t work for me:

1. By two-thirds of the way through, the plot rested too heavily on Harry’s thin shoulders. We’re reminded over and over how much Genevieve loves him – even when it’s become jarringly evident she doesn’t. That works. We can see the trajectory of her self-discovery through it. But there wasn’t enough of why she loved him in the first place – he was too thin and insubstantial – for this to hold up its end of Genevieve’s motivations for as long as it had to. She’s a smart chicken. She would have figured it out before then.

2. JAL really needs to get a new editor. Whenever I read her stuff my enjoyment is continually interrupted by bad grammatical errors and bad word repetitions (by this I mean: the repetition isn’t there to create a lyrical effect, it’s just lazy writing. A relief that was hugely relieving, for example). She also has a tendency to overwrite, which mostly pays off and occasionally doesn’t. A good editor should be on the lookout for all these things.

This Julie Anne Long book makes my top five. Go read it.

End rant.

selling a convoluted plot

I didn’t intend to blog today, but the book I’m reading is irritating the hell out of me for a couple of reasons, so here I am to vent my spleen.

(Lucky you!)

The book is I Kissed an Earl, the fourth in Julie Anne Long‘s Pennyroyal Green series. I loved the first and really enjoyed the second. Her writing has inspired me a lot, and I see her talent as something to aspire to. She uses language in a vivid, overabundant, surprising way. One of my favourite passages from Like No Other Lover:

…from that moment on he saw every woman anew, sought evidence in their eyes of the tick of their minds, danced with them as if holding little grenades.

and,

He smiled very slightly all the way through that silk and muslin jungle as though his smile was a passport, a lantern, an apology for the fact that his elegant English manners were only now returning to him along with his English complexion, by degrees.

I cannot say why, but the charm of her writing is somehow missing from this book, leaving only the overabundance. One problem is that she’s given her alpha female – whose intellect and propensity to act out have been built over a few books – an uber-alpha male. She built the question, “What man would Violet Redmond ever fall for?” and I don’t think her hero answers it. They’re simply trying to out-alpha each other all the time, which leaves so little room for tenderness, or vulnerability, or even a sense of liking.

But the much worse offense, I’ve just realised, is that her central plot-device has no legs. Violet has stowed herself on board Captain Flint’s ship, because she believes the pirate Flint is hunting is actually her AWOL brother.

Of itself, it doesn’t have to be problematic, though I’m not a huge fan of “we’re going on an adventure” plotlines.

But the way she’s written it, I’m not in any way cheering for Violet – I’m just cringing at the nuisance she’s making of herself. This is a huge peeve of mine in romance novels, when whatever actions the heroine takes result in chaos and undermine the hero’s well-planned strategies. I like to see a heroine go for something and have the power and autonomy and, good God, intelligence to make it work.

Violet’s desire to find her brother would work as a goal and motivation – I could get on board for a woman who decides she’s going to do something about his absence – but aside from being told “she loved more deeply than other people” we’re not shown any part of their relationship. We have no investment in her brother, or any sense of what she would risk for him.

With no emotional basis, her decision becomes a farce – and it breaks my suspended disbelief.

The hero’s reaction to her breaks his character, which is just as bad. When he finds her aboard his ship, he allows himself to get pulled into playing games with her for her right to his bed, to her place on his ship, to her portion of food. Even though he feels no particular preference for her. And even though he’s dragged himself from bastardy to an Earldom by his own hard work and bloody-mindedness.

A man like that wouldn’t think twice about locking her in a room and dumping her at the nearest port. And I’m given nothing in the narrative to suggest otherwise.

My plot involves a cross-dressing Duke, so you can imagine how I take this lesson in convoluted plot to heart.

End rant.

books and Brad Pitt

two things about my Easter weekend away:

1. My godmother, who we were staying with, also reads romance. A lot of romance. She let me rifle through the boxes of books she’s finished with, and take whatever I fancied. She is, officially, a champion.

The books:

I took home 32 books. But seriously, what would you have done?

There were many I’ve already read and wanted for my collection but couldn’t justify buying right now. I got the whole of Eloisa James‘s Essex Sisters quartet, and Meredith Duran‘s entire backlist.

I also picked up a few I’ve been meaning to try, but haven’t gotten around to reading, like Nalini Singh‘s Psy/Changeling series and Anne Stuart‘s House of Rohan trilogy.

…

2. Then there was Legends of the Fall. It was revoltingly appropriate that we rewatched this Brad Pitt classic, because we watched it together too many times to be healthy as teens. This is Brad back in the day when he still had more than a whiff of tv soap about him and his grin was of the cocky “I’m hot and I know it” variety.

I had the same sensation watching it as I had last year when I listened to Alanis Morisette’s album Jagged Little Pill and realised I knew the words to every song.

I had a groundless sense of fear or premonition at apparently harmless moments, just before tragedy fell. Certain images were so familiar to my senses, that I must have stared for hours at posters of them, freeze-framed on my bedroom wall.

My memory was correct at least in this: Julia Ormond cries more or less the whole way through the film.

It also clicked that this was why all my heroes used to be called Tristan.

Here’s the funny thing, though: Watching this movie as an adult, I couldn’t help thinking that Tristan (Brad Pitt) is exactly the kind of character who incites my rage – and the last person you would want to fall in love with.

He is, as per the voice-over, the rock that all the people who love him break themselves against.

He is the man who would leave those who love and depend on him to answer the call of his inner beast. He is unhaveable and wild and wildly selfish.

He’s a flake.

I couldn’t help thinking, as well, that Susannah (Julia Ormond) is the antithesis of a romantic heroine. The tragedy of that appealed to my teen sensibilities and just irritates the hell out of my adult ones.