![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Whatever Common Wednesdays Do
Jun. 27th, 2018 01:30 pmWhat I've Finished Reading
A Great Deliverance is an odd book with an oddly unmemorable title - I put it in the donate box after I'd finished it and I kept having to get it out again because I couldn't remember what the hell it was called, even though the tie-in with the murder is obvious long before the detectives figure it out. It's recorded as "A Something Something by E. George" in my book journal because I didn't feel like getting up just then.
It's a wild jumble of tropes and tragedies, and if it were just a little better written, I would say that's just how life is sometimes. It lost me in the end, though. The author is, as far as I can tell, an American who thinks Britain's most pressing social problem is poor people jumping to unkind conclusions about rich people - and honestly, even as an inveterate and shameless consumer of gent. sleuths, I found the degree to which all the posh characters were presented as self-possessed, intelligent, and saintly here to be a little hard to take. There are several of them and they're always gliding in and out of rooms with sad but benevolent smiles on their chiseled faces.
There is a certain amount of protesting too much about Lynley in particular. Barbara Havers, Lynley's working-class partner, is forever being firehosed by heavy-handed internal monologues about how wrong she's been to judge Lynley and how shocking it is that he and his friends are nice to her and have complicated inner lives! Her assumptions have been shaken to the core! At one point she reflects that "Lynley's was turning out to be such a multifaceted character, like a diamond cut by a master jeweler, that in every situation a new surface glittered that she had never seen before." This is such an extravagant overstatement of the case that I laughed out loud. For reference, the glittering facets to date: rich dude with title, shockingly not a complete asshole about everything 100% of the time, unexpectedly good at his job after all, bearer of several boring and goopy romantic subplots.
All of this might have been more tolerable in a cozier crimescape, if the Big Reveal and background crimes hadn't been so grimly "realistic" and soul-killing. Scroll over the white text if you might read this book and would like to see a content warning! This book contains [two full chapters of child sexual abuse], described at length and in great detail in a borderline exploitative style that was probably considered chilling and effective in 1988. It's accompanied by some graphically described self-harm, with an internal monologue from the self-harming character. This is the human-evil-spelunking portion of the ride, and I don't think it's particularly well done. For the rest - I don't know; it's ok. I read it all. It boils where it should simmer - not just in the lengthy reveal, but in Barbara's embarrassing outbursts and Lynley's unrequited love nonsense, and all the weirdly earnest PSAs about how Earls Are People Too, and the wonderfully inappropriate and pointless Comedy Americans, who have nothing at all to do with anything except to annoy British people of all classes and foil the comparative sophistication of the author, who would totally rise to the occasion if invited to stay at a castle in Yorkshire.
I feel that if a book is going to take a lot of perfectly good detective tropes and spoil them with unmitigated horror and misery, it had better make it worth my time. Ruth Rendell can pull it off, but Elizabeth George hasn't yet. Maybe in the sequel! My hopes aren't high, but they aren't totally nonexistent yet.
What I'm Reading Now
Monstrous Regiment is pretty good! Polly Perks chops off her hair and joins the army in an attempt to find her brother, who joined up and vanished into one of Borogrovia's endless wars. Things clearly aren't going as well as everyone says. Polly's regiment is a rag-tag collection of beardless boys and maligned fantasy creatures. Bit by bit, Polly finds out that she's not the only soldier with a couple of socks down her trousers. Are we going to find out that all the men have been maimed or killed and the women are the only ones left? I don't know, but I'm sure it'll be funny and probably sad.
What I Plan to Read Next
Another Lynley book whose unmemorable name I don't feel like checking just now - Paid in Blood? Something about blood? - and the other books I brought with me (Sylvester, A Game of Thrones, and The Dollmaker).
A Great Deliverance is an odd book with an oddly unmemorable title - I put it in the donate box after I'd finished it and I kept having to get it out again because I couldn't remember what the hell it was called, even though the tie-in with the murder is obvious long before the detectives figure it out. It's recorded as "A Something Something by E. George" in my book journal because I didn't feel like getting up just then.
It's a wild jumble of tropes and tragedies, and if it were just a little better written, I would say that's just how life is sometimes. It lost me in the end, though. The author is, as far as I can tell, an American who thinks Britain's most pressing social problem is poor people jumping to unkind conclusions about rich people - and honestly, even as an inveterate and shameless consumer of gent. sleuths, I found the degree to which all the posh characters were presented as self-possessed, intelligent, and saintly here to be a little hard to take. There are several of them and they're always gliding in and out of rooms with sad but benevolent smiles on their chiseled faces.
There is a certain amount of protesting too much about Lynley in particular. Barbara Havers, Lynley's working-class partner, is forever being firehosed by heavy-handed internal monologues about how wrong she's been to judge Lynley and how shocking it is that he and his friends are nice to her and have complicated inner lives! Her assumptions have been shaken to the core! At one point she reflects that "Lynley's was turning out to be such a multifaceted character, like a diamond cut by a master jeweler, that in every situation a new surface glittered that she had never seen before." This is such an extravagant overstatement of the case that I laughed out loud. For reference, the glittering facets to date: rich dude with title, shockingly not a complete asshole about everything 100% of the time, unexpectedly good at his job after all, bearer of several boring and goopy romantic subplots.
All of this might have been more tolerable in a cozier crimescape, if the Big Reveal and background crimes hadn't been so grimly "realistic" and soul-killing. Scroll over the white text if you might read this book and would like to see a content warning! This book contains [two full chapters of child sexual abuse], described at length and in great detail in a borderline exploitative style that was probably considered chilling and effective in 1988. It's accompanied by some graphically described self-harm, with an internal monologue from the self-harming character. This is the human-evil-spelunking portion of the ride, and I don't think it's particularly well done. For the rest - I don't know; it's ok. I read it all. It boils where it should simmer - not just in the lengthy reveal, but in Barbara's embarrassing outbursts and Lynley's unrequited love nonsense, and all the weirdly earnest PSAs about how Earls Are People Too, and the wonderfully inappropriate and pointless Comedy Americans, who have nothing at all to do with anything except to annoy British people of all classes and foil the comparative sophistication of the author, who would totally rise to the occasion if invited to stay at a castle in Yorkshire.
I feel that if a book is going to take a lot of perfectly good detective tropes and spoil them with unmitigated horror and misery, it had better make it worth my time. Ruth Rendell can pull it off, but Elizabeth George hasn't yet. Maybe in the sequel! My hopes aren't high, but they aren't totally nonexistent yet.
What I'm Reading Now
Monstrous Regiment is pretty good! Polly Perks chops off her hair and joins the army in an attempt to find her brother, who joined up and vanished into one of Borogrovia's endless wars. Things clearly aren't going as well as everyone says. Polly's regiment is a rag-tag collection of beardless boys and maligned fantasy creatures. Bit by bit, Polly finds out that she's not the only soldier with a couple of socks down her trousers. Are we going to find out that all the men have been maimed or killed and the women are the only ones left? I don't know, but I'm sure it'll be funny and probably sad.
What I Plan to Read Next
Another Lynley book whose unmemorable name I don't feel like checking just now - Paid in Blood? Something about blood? - and the other books I brought with me (Sylvester, A Game of Thrones, and The Dollmaker).
