Some books of december

[oneiriad]

Steven Brust:  Athyra, Orca, Dragon
*cries* The Danish libraries haven't bought the newer books. Dammit. Dammit, dammit, dammit.

Juan Diaz Canales: Blacksad - L'enfer, Le Silence
Blacksad is a quite gorgeous comic book series. Detective noir stories with antropomorphic animals, the hero being a black tomcat, and plots are quite decent. Admittedly, the series try to transfer real-world ideas of racism as prejudice against black and white pride using appropriately coloured animals, which, well, story-wise it's nice, but it kind of makes some things a little mind-bending, considering - you try fitting something green into those prejudices. But definitely gorgeous.

Arthur Conan Doyle:  The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Valley of Fear
The Hound is a pretty awesome book, but you probably already knew that. As for the Valley, then it's a decent locked-room mystery kind of ruined by the same device used in A Study in Scarlet, namely spending the latter half of the book giving the backstory, which was kind of predictable, really.

Georgette Heyer:  A Civil Contract
I quite enjoyed this novel. It's nice to read a tale of a marriage of convenience, that isn't negative, but has two adults, who, each for their own reasons, accept each other. Besides, it was a fun read, and I think I should probably read some more of this Heyer lady's work.

Laurie R. King:  Touchstone
This novel is set in the 20's, and deal with an FBI agent who comes to England hunting a dangerous criminal, and gets involved with a dastardedly British spy, who in turn wants to get his grubby hands on a young soldier, who has acquired amazing talents in the Sherlock Scan department due to trauma from the trenches. It's perhaps a bit too close to the author's Sherlock Holmes verse, in some ways - close enough a crossover wouldn't surprise me.

Dorothy L. Sayers: Whose Body?,  Clouds of Witness
It's interesting, how much of the inspiration for Miles Vorkosigan is obviously from the Lord Peter Wimsey stories. Anyway, interesting, need to read more.

Guillermo del Toro: The Fall
All due respect to Mr. del Toro, but so far, I really think he needs to stay in the movie business.

Teddy Vork:  Diget (The dike)
A very nice little horror novel. Set at some point in the early middle ages, in a coastal village near Ribe, the tale centeres around a young boy, who, when part of the local dike is washed away, leading the community to seek refuge in old pagan rituals in an attempt to protect their fields from the sea (rather than just get to bloody rebuilding the bloody thing), is the one selected to get buried alive as a human sacrifice. We follow him, as he is locked in a dark chamber in the dike, and how he, scared and alone in the dark, slowly weakened by hunger and thirst and a conviction that something dark and terrible is coming for him, and still, he fights back, seeking refuge in retelling himself stories. The novel shows a rather scary view of the world through the boy's eyes, a world of monsters lurking in the dark, and yet, as you read, you can also make out the more realistic explanations for various things - or can you? Nicely creepy, and with lots of nice use of old Danish monsters. Like the Gam, all the more scary for never actually being properly shown anywhere.

Right, one more book, and I saved it for last, because this is going to be a bit of rant. My apoligies beforehand hereby given

M.S. Hunter: The Buccaneer
I bought this for the gay pirates. I admit it. I wasn't expecting much, really, mostly just some not too serious adventures on the high seas.

The novel takes the shape of the autobiography of Tommy the Cutlass, a fierce pirate during the Golden Age of Piracy, from his early days at sea through his rising through the ranks (such as they are, among pirates) and eventually, how he and his crew of mostly gay pirates retire to settle on an unclaimed island. Along the way, he meets the love of his life, the Ashanti prince/former slave/fierce pirate Ozzie the Spear, and has a long-standing rivalry ending in the defeat of his nemesis, a wicked, racist pirate, and everything is sprinkled with lots of random sexual encounters and the occasional bit of violence. Furthermore, framing the main narrative is a second narrative, a middle-aged historian on the modern day island nation that grew from Tommy's colony, dividing his time between transcribing Tommy's autobiography into modern English and carrying on an affair with a young, local man.

So far so good.

The main plot is alright, if somewhat lacking in any interesting twist and turns. The historical aspects are reasonably well researched, although the author seems a bit too fond of B.R. Burg's theories, although considering the main theme, that's forgivable. The nautical aspects, well, the author is clever enough not to get into too many details most of the time and thereby not getting out where he doesn't know what he's talking about, so that's alright. The erotic bits are, well, frankly, kind of dull - it mostly feels like the author had a check-list of positions he wanted to get through along the way, and doing so graphically (seriously, if it was fanfic, the warnings would start at non-con, dub-con, twincest and inappropriate use of arm-stumps...)

In short, the novel is mostly alright, if somewhat forgettable. Or it would be, if that was all. If that was all, I wouldn't be spending half as much time writing this post.

Right, so. The thing is, Tommy, our hero, is a great, big misogynist of the girl's has cooties school (literally, in one case). They disgust him, plain and simple, and when the time comes for the settling the island, he is only reluctantly convinced to allow a few women on the island by his friends arguing that they will only be for a)sex for the minority of non-gay pirates, b)servants to do all the boring jobs that would otherwise have to be done by slaves (which the multiracial pirate crew won't have) and c)broodmares to produce sons for happy gay couples.

Now, don't get me wrong, I don't think that a character's view is supposed to represent a novel's, let alone an author's, even if he is the main character. However, I find no evidence in the text to ever suggest to me, that the author isn't expressing his own.

First of all, the novel is a first-person narrative. Now, in the right hands, a first-person story is a marvellous thing, because even if you don't play around with the full-scale unreliable narrator, the fp allows you to show the world as seen and interpreted through alien eyes, allowing your readers to come to their own conclusions. A clever author can easily subvert a narrator, if they want to. This doesn't happen here. For a lot of the story, the misogyny hardly appear, simply due to the rather overwhelming absence of women for most of the novel. Less than a hand-full is named, only once does Tommy have a conversation with one (and comes away thinking her one of absolutely nicest women his ever met, and it would have been nice to have had even a hint that author meant it as a parallel to Tommy's much earlier discovery that black people are just like white, only hotter (well, to his mind, anyway), but no such luck). Of course, the easiest way to counter the misogyny would have been to have had some women characters, but I suppose the author thought they would get in the way of the his gay pirate orgies. Still, it would have been nice with just a hint - for instance, one pirate who is rather obvious by his absence in a novel that loves to name-drop famous historical pirates is Calico Jack. A scene with Tommy meeting Jack and his crew and commenting on the fine young pair of men in his crew, well, that would have been a nice wink to the reader in the know, you know? No such luck.

Of course, all this is the first person narrative of someone from the 17th century, or supposed to be. If it had stood alone, I suspect I would have settled for rolling my eyes and moving on.

Except, then we have the framing narrative, which is set in the present (well, present of the book's writing), and where the historian transcribing the autobiography (who is named M.S. Hunter in the text, leaving an impression that this is as close as the opinion of the author as we'll get) will often interrupt with historical titbits and several times comments on various prejudices of Tommy and the 17th century, but not once on the misogyny. He's far to busy making nudge-nudge-wink-wink comments about the descriptions of Tommy's sex life and reenacting parts of it with his boyfriend. Fair enough.

But where it gets chilling, and where I just can't deal with it anymore, is in the description of San Vito, the modern island nation that has grown from Tommy's merry band of buggering buccaneers settling down. It is described as utopic, simply put, equality between races, secret economic superpower, all the men being happy and gay together. Fine. Want to know about the women of San Vito? It is directly stated, that they have, since the early days, been servants and broodmares, and that this is still pretty much the situation in modern day. The historian doesn't seem to have a problem with this. On the contrary, in the very next paragraph he is praising San Vito's sexual mores, claiming that all modern nations could learn something from them. Elsewhere, he expresses pleasure that apparently, women aren't allowed at San Vito's beaches, thus not getting in the way of his visual enjoyment of the handsome natives.

Funny thing is, if the author had just kept it at the hinting, that would have made it a nicely subtle piece of dystopian fiction - but explicitly stating that this is how it is and never even stopping to consider...

You know, I knew when I picked it up, that I wasn't the intended audience for this book. A gay pirate novel from the 80's? I doubt the author had ever heard of slash or m/m, and wouldn't have conceived of a woman picking up his book. But I wasn't prepared for such, well, such hate. I mean, if all he wanted was to get rid of the women, so they wouldn't get in the way of his admiring young men, well, why not have the women of San Vito, growing tired of the men not being interested at all, moving into a village of their own, practising exotic sapphic rites and only meeting up with men for the sake of producing children? Fair enough that you want a gay utopia, but why does it have to be so strongly implied to be build on the misery of an entire class? Is the author simply unable to imagine a society that doesn't oppress somebody?

I know the name of your little island utopia, Mr. Hunter. It's Omelas. I wonder if you even realize that yourself?