The Romantic Armchair Traveller

USA: Twilight by Stephenie Meyer

 

Having recently caught on TV the three motion picture adaptations of the Twilight saga released so far and found them a now-or-never inducement to take a stab at reading the first volume in Stephenie Meyer’s YA paranormal romance series, I came away from the experience with one overriding reaction: it’s like, OMG, TOTALLY about the WRONG couple! Noooo!! Go Team Jalice XOXO!!

Ahem. Now that my long-buried inner teenager has had her squeal (Jasper and Alice 4eva!!), on to the novel that started the international craze. Whether the book would prove a hit or miss, I was prepared for suitably Hallowe’en-y frissons, having been surprised by the unpretentious sweetness, family focus, and suspense plot of the first Twilight film, which confounded the negative impressions I had formed of a Young Adult novel I expected to be a bizarre, chewing-gum read. My conclusion, 496 pages later? The philosophical issues about love and death raised by the story – with the concomitant tensions arising from such contradictory forces – exert a fascination independent of the naïve writing and unreflective narrative. In a comparison between the book and its screen adaptation I am hard pressed to think of a single instance where the film version of Twilight is not a significant improvement over the novel. Stephenie Meyer’s imagination in all honour, she owes a great debt to the filmmakers for everything from plot development and characterisations to buildup of suspense and discreet cleanup of toxic elements.

 

The newest arrival in Forks High School, seventeen year-old Isabella “Bella” Swan from sun-baked Arizona (USA) dreads life in the nondescript small town on the Olympic Peninsula (Washington State), one of the rainiest and cloudiest regions in the country. But she is not the only curiosity in school. Beautiful and mysterious, the Cullens keep to themselves as if they belong to an exclusive club. Edward Cullen, in particular, goes out of his way to avoid Bella – when he is not being troublingly rude.

On an icy winter morning in the school parking lot, all that changes in the span of a heartbeat. About to be crushed between two vehicles as a skidding car slams into them, Bella is saved from certain death by none other than Edward. The more he tries to explain away the miracle and fights the strange attraction between them, the more resolved she becomes to figure out what he is hiding. When she does, both find out just how dangerous love can be.

 

Twilight is essentially a rescue fantasy about a glamorous boy delivering a girl from the mediocrity of her life and waking her emotionally to a special love through his eternal worship. Only this boy has been seventeen years old since 1918, and the thing that first attracts him to the girl is the scent of her blood, at once more exquisite and agonising than anything he has ever experienced in his nearly hundred-year-long existence (Stephenie Meyer’s novel was originally published in 2005; my edition is a Little, Brown and Company media tie-in paperback from 2008). To the girl, on the other hand, love is more important than death, and she is determined to prove it to the boy – even if it kills her. Depending on which reader of the Twilight saga you listen to, it is a match made either in fairytale heaven or in spousal-abuse hell.

 

Before I continue, I must clarify that the only way I was able to even begin to process the relationship between Bella and Edward was to consciously decide that time and space function differently in the world of Twilight than in the one in which I live, and that this applies to the concept of age. It has been said that vampires are “frozen in time” from the moment they are turned. In other words, they don’t age. At least not physically. But how about their minds? On one hand, Edward’s brooding emotional life is no more advanced than that of any other seventeen-year old, as if every experience he has had since turning a vampire has slid off his sparkly skin like rain instead of being absorbed into his internal make-up. He can certainly behave like a bratty adolescent (consider any scene involving boys interested in Bella), and he generally defers to the guidance of his adoptive parents. On the other hand, time has allowed him to develop his piano playing skills into those of a virtuoso, and his accumulated experiences persuade him he is better placed than Bella to know what is best in any given situation. So which is it – is Edward mentally a teenager or a nearly hundred-year old man? As a courtesy to the author who describes her story not as horror but romance, I chose to pretend that he is a precocious teen with an age complex.

 

Edward Cullen is a member of a vampire coven who have made a moral decision to abstain from harming humans, subsisting instead on animal blood – to them, the vampire equivalent of tofu, which is why the Cullens jokingly refer to themselves as vegetarians. However, the only one who has completely mastered the instinctive thirst is the family patriarch; the others still struggle with occasional bouts of temptation. Edward comes face to face with the most excruciating temptation of his reformed existence when his craving for Bella puts this moral code to the test. Gifted with effortless mind-reading, he is thrown into even deeper confusion by the impenetrability of Bella’s thoughts. Cue lashings of angst and “ancient pain”.

 

The first-person narrator of the story, Bella Swan, by nature a loner, is very private and quite self-sufficient, the latter probably partially due to the behaviour of her parents. “You put on a good show,” Edward tells her (page 49). “But I’d be willing to bet that you’re suffering more than you let anyone see.” He may have a point. With divorced parents who are barely there even though they appear to love her, and a self-sacrificing move from a home she loves to a place she detests, Bella could very well be a depressed teen. Although she calls her mother her best friend (105), in the next breath, talking about her relationship with her mother – according to whom Bella grows “more middle-aged every year” – she drops a revealing comment: “someone has to be the adult” (106). Just how heavily this sense of responsibility for her scatter-brained, co-dependent parent weighs on Bella is evident in two of the most important decisions Bella makes: the first sends her away to Forks, the second, at the book’s climax, nearly results in her death. Bella’s father, the police chief of Forks (an inexplicably pointless professional role in the novel but one that is given relevancy in the film), appreciates that Bella has chosen to stay with him while her mother adjusts to newly remarried life, but he is emotionally closed-off and not much of a support. The differences between her family and the close-knit, affectionate, and loyal Cullens cannot fail to have an impact on Bella.

 

Her age, introvert personality, and family situation also go some way toward mitigating her martyrdom about being the new girl in town. As self-absorbed and tormented by uncertainty as any other teen, Bella is both perceptive and painfully unself-aware. Unfortunately the author did not help me sympathise with Bella’s misery about how freakishly out of place and undesirable she is - being cursed with pallor (her skin is clear and translucent) and clumsiness (which appears to add to her charm in the eyes of others) - because circumstances incessantly underscore her popularity and specialness. Her process of settling into a new school in a new place could hardly be smoother or more ideal. From the first day, girls and boys flock to her, offering friendship. At the first opportunity, boys in her crowd are falling over themselves with eagerness to ask her to a dance, for, as is pointed out to her, the male school contingent admires her whether she deems herself pretty or not (of course she doesn’t). The girls who aren’t dazzled are quickly shown to be unlikeable and jealous, anyway. Jacob, a Quileute from the La Push reservation whose family she knew when they were both younger, also falls under her spell. She is adored by her super-special boyfriend and implicitly trusted by her parents. Then there is the fact that she is the only person whose mind Edward cannot read, and the only human admitted into the confidence of the Cullens, who find her remarkably brave.

 

Bella is written in a way that presents her as sensitive, compassionate, and sensible. I don’t see any authorial intent to deliberately suggest that she may have a selfish side. Nevertheless, Bella is not merely shy but a bit of a misanthrope. Fellow junior Mike’s friendly attentiveness makes her compare him to a golden retriever; she also imagines him wagging a tail (30,51). Tyler’s remorse and panicked concern upon causing the near-fatal accident in the parking lot causes her to find him irritating and to ignore him. Beyond a single “are you all right” at the sight of his bloodied bandages (61), she expresses no further interest in his welfare. Indeed, she dismisses him as “another unwelcome fan” (69). The very first girl who befriends her and introduces her to fellow students she cannot bother listening to even during that initial encounter (17). That several boys ask her to the dance causes her not embarrassed pleasure but annoyance in a sequence of episodes I suspect are intended to be humorous; instead I found Bella’s inner commentary about her suitors arrogant and petty (chapter four). The irony when Bella describes as standoffish a “girl who had always ignored me at the lunch table” (79) stood out in precious contrast. Notably, too, the girls of her acquaintance “babble” and “prattle” and “chatter”, “completely unaware of [Bella’s] inattention” (17,86, 118). When Edward (who like his foster siblings has always distanced himself from every other fellow student) suddenly beckons to Bella in the cafeteria to join him, Bella feels insulted by her girlfriend’s astonishment at his interest (87). She does not show any concern for her friends’ feelings and thoughts, never asking them anything personal or showing un-self-seeking kindliness toward them. She notices and fends off, repeatedly, their awe about and invitations to her, though. Unless she needs information or has something else to gain from spending time with them (including Jacob), her own interest is reserved solely for Edward. Here, too, the film adaptation marks a positive change: screen Bella is a less passive friend and more assertive young woman, for example encouraging a friend not to wait for a call from the boy she fancies but to phone him: “Take control. You’re a strong, independent woman.”

 

One of the most curious incidents in the novel takes place on First Beach at La Push, where Bella and Jacob first become re-acquainted. Unlike the earnest, quiet, and relatively smart Bella of the film (sensitively played by Kristen Stewart), the novel’s Bella is sometimes quite deliberately and rather stunningly manipulative. At La Push she determines to use seduction to fish for information from the younger, dazzled Jacob, information he and his family are reluctant to impart (121-3). For a girl who is explicitly described as wise beyond her years and sensitive to boot, and whose physical relationship with her boyfriend is chaste and demure, it seems disturbing and significant that the first and only method that occurs to her of gaining the information she wants is to use a sexual lure. In yet another scene, Bella briefly reveals an additional, eyebrow-raising side to her character: she secretly toys with the idea of deliberately placing herself in harm’s way to ensure that Edward, who has taken upon himself to keep her safe, will not leave her (211). These incidents illustrate Bella from angles which I assumed the author would deliberately include in the character arc as flaws or events that come back to haunt or punish the character and teach her to take responsibility for her actions. Alas, cause and effect appear the sketchiest of concepts in Twilight. Bella suffers no consequences nor even any lasting pangs of guilt for having exploited the humble and decent Jacob; and her suicidal impulse fails to receive authorial attention. In Twilight, characters are not necessarily made to earn their happy endings by working through difficulties; arrogance, for example, is rewarded. It is a type of self-gratifying storytelling wherein wish-fulfillment frequently appears to plays a larger role than, say, plot logic, dramatic structure, and character psychology.

 

Narcissism is a prevalent trait not only of Bella’s character or her relationship with Edward but of the general tone and style of storytelling. Everyone seems described first, last, and sometimes only in terms of their looks. These looks are generally indicative of where they stand in Bella or Edward’s estimation. The Cullens are out-of-this-world gorgeous; questionable vampires are also beautiful but less so (and the ranking order of beautifulness among them is duly noted, page 376); while the most villainous vampire actually looks ordinary - perhaps the most damning attribute in the Twilight universe (376, 445). Unsurprisingly, while Rosalie (Hale) Cullen is the most striking female Bella has ever seen, she is also uncharacteristically (for a Cullen) spiteful, vain, and bitterly jealous of Bella. Also as expected since he is the hero in a story where external beauty is extolled above everything else, nothing and nobody can touch the gloriousness that is Edward. In one of the most blatant cases of gratuitous objectification I have encountered in fiction, Bella obsesses about his looks from beginning to end (the epilogue, page 481: “my breath caught in my throat. Would I ever get used to his perfection?”). But possessing superhuman handsomeness, speed, strength, and ability to read minds is not enough. Bella’s comment, “Well, it would be nice if I could find just one thing you didn’t do better than everyone else on the planet” is less sarcastic than it sounds (371; also see page 325). Can such a prince be allowed a girlfriend who looks like the student Mike is forced to sit next to in biology class, a girl Bella primly notes has braces and “a bad perm”? Not in Twilight. As I have tried to demonstrate, Edward’s reassurance to his modestly unconfident lady love seems a trifle superfluous: “Trust me just this once – you are the opposite of ordinary” (210). These two are the adored stars of the show, and the reader is never allowed to forget it. Pages 260-320 basically constitute one long ode to to their mutual wonderfulness.

 

While the superficiality of characterisations and focus on physical attractiveness in Twilight seem extreme, they are hardly unique features in pop culture. Of more immediate concern in a novel written for entertaining young readers is a storyline that victimises the supposed heroine by shoving her into life-threatening situations over and over again (film trailer) without once giving her the means to influence their outcome. She is allowed no opportunity to save herself nor to participate in her own rescue, whether through reliance on her wits or application of physical resistance (fuelled by desperation if nothing else), not even in the climaxing action, as part of a group effort. The film attempts to redress this message by having another female character leap capably into that last fight and dispatch of the enemy together with the men. In the novel, that culminating confrontation occurs off page, is summarised in one sentence, and involves only male characters (461); meanwhile, the full focus during that climax is on the heroine’s suffering. When it really counts, she is made an object of pity instead of being allowed to test and prove her resourcefulness.

 

Thus, I remain unconvinced by arguments that Bella is truly the heroine of her own story. At the end of the book, she gets her wish, Edward, without having learned anything about the human condition, without having had to redeem herself, and without having paid any price. While Edward’s shining armour is his sparkly vampire powers and his white horse is a silver Volvo, Twilight is still the patriarchal tale, taken to nuanceless extremes, of the damsel in distress rescued by a knight. Bella may possess some assertive qualities including a measure of independence and a mind of her own, but her faculties don’t extend to an active or successful stake in protecting herself. When there is danger, she cannot manage without a rescuing male. While various aspects of Twilight have drawn comparisons to classics such as Pride and Prejudice, Wuthering Heights, and Jane Eyre, I would argue that Bella Swan’s closest literary relative is in fact Sleeping Beauty.

 

Nor is Bella’s physical passiveness the only limitation imposed on her ability to take charge. In a reversal of genre conventions that generally see protagonists grow from a position of weakness to a position of strength, Bella goes from a young woman shouldered with perhaps too much responsibility but possessing the intelligence to make smart, independent decisions and look after herself competently, to a girl who is judged too frail, inexperienced, and endangered to be allowed to trust her own judgment or exercise free will. Yes, it is time to take a closer look at her relationship with Edward Cullen.

 

The relationship between Edward and Bella perfectly demonstrates why an alpha hero typically needs to be paired with an alpha heroine if the romance is to maintain a healthy balance of equality and to make both characters shine. Without a strong heroine to confidently challenge his ideas about right and wrong and demand respect or else show him the door, the overbearing alpha male walks all over the heroine, behaving as if domination is romantic proof of caring and commitment. In Twilight, Edward is in charge of the couple’s journey and he has no intention of sharing control. Nothing happens between him and Bella without his prior approval, and it is for Bella to accept and conform to his wishes, even when it makes her angry or unhappy. Edward decides when she should eat (314-5), when she should take medication (477), whether she should be allowed to drive (104), how long and under which conditions they should remain a couple (211, 479). He dismisses her ability to make rational decisions; when they disagree, he refuses to negotiate or compromise and simply overrules her. He encourages her passivity and discourages her independence and friendships, helping to stifle her growth into a woman and an individual with values beyond the self and its wants. When she protests, he says she does not know what she is talking about and that everything he does is for her own good. Because neither reason, fairness, nor trust will make Edward relinquish power, and because he will utilise superior physical strength if that will serve him as well as read the minds of any person she may confide in, Bella can only get her way through begging, evasion, or secrecy. Earlier I commented on how every time Bella sees or meets Edward she reacts by being awestruck by his beauty, specifically his face. One might theorise that perhaps she does not dwell on his inner qualities because they don’t make her feel good: being with him she tends to experience feelings of deep inadequacy.

 

By turns avuncular, domineering, and bratty, Edward’s pathological behaviour demolished any intrigue about the enigma he initially represents by setting off all my creep alarms. Neither the novel nor the film challenges his stalkerism, which is presented as romantic acts by a protective lover and therefore does not need to be checked. Bella says, “’You spied on me?’ But somehow I couldn’t infuse my voice with the proper outrage. I was flattered.”; “[Edward] was unrepentant. ‘What else is there to do at night?’” (292-3). When she enquires how often he has come to her house, and the answer stuns her, her fear revolves only around any embarrassing things he may have overheard during her sleep. The fact that he has spent night after night uninvited, unknown to her, in her bedroom does not merit any commentary on ethics or predatorial behaviour. In fact, on an earlier occasion Bella reflects, “I wondered if it should bother me that he was following me; instead I felt a strange surge of pleasure” (174). Bella’s defective sense of self-preservation and her resignation in the face of Edward’s refusal to treat her as a rational equal are among the foremost reasons why I would hesitate to put Twilight in the hands of any impressionable young reader without a serious discussion of its gender dynamics.

 

So, if Edward is so terrible – or a terrible choice for her – why does Bella love him and want to stay with him forever? Well, for one thing, this is a fantasy with fated soulmates, the type of love story where the characters cannot help but give in to a destiny that has pre-ordained them for each other. And of course there is that overwhelming physical attraction, never to be underestimated in either fiction or real life. Thirdly, remember Bella’s co-dependent mother, whom Bella feels compelled to protect and care for? Bella appears to see some of that same vulnerability, in addition to nobility, in Edward’s desperate struggle to be good. It is a syndrome that recalls fairytales like Beauty and the Beast, and to a degree the mediaeval myths of the virgin and the unicorn. And finally there is the darker facet to Bella’s personality: her attitude to danger and fascination with death. I am not much for vampire lore, but the one novel where I thought the subject interestingly treated, albeit in unorthodox fashion, was Karen Harbaugh’s French Revolution romance, Night Fires, where vampirism means horror, not romanticism, to the infected heroine, to whom human mortality is desirable and redemptive. She is the diametric opposite of Bella, to whom vampirism means perfection and who perceives mortality as a demeaning, unnatural state. True, Twilight is a fantasy and a fairytale, but Bella is a very good reason for why this YA novel cannot be exempted from discussions about teenage suicide and romantic notions of death.

 

It is not that difficult to see why Edward is drawn to Bella, beyond the scent of her blood which in itself has already singled her out as special (he has never felt the same about any other human’s blood). Both are outsiders and loners who recognise a fellow special being in each other. Bella at once gives him a purpose – to protect her; provides a romantic companion – a century is a long time to be alone, particularly when everyone else in your family has a partner; presents a challenge and a mystery as he cannot read her mind – boredom is a problem for long-time vampires who have seen everything, done everything, learnt everything, and never sleep; and she represents redemption – through her, he can do penance for his past. (Any reader who thinks Edward is exaggerating when he describes himself as a monster might be interested in taking a look at the biology class massacre he is shown planning in Midnight Sun, Meyer’s unpublished, partial manuscript which shows the events of Twilight from Edward’s point of view.)

 

Numerous paper-thin characters flit in and out of the story, most with negligible consequence for the principals or the plot. Only Bella and Edward have any sort of character arcs (and my use of that term is generous). That said, due to the films I took more interest in two of these characters than the paltry word count allocated to them warrants. The newest members of the Cullen vampire coven, Alice and Jasper, like Edward, attend high school in the guise of being foster children of Esme Cullen and her husband, Carlisle. The only one in the family whose struggle to permanently abstain from human blood seems to hold a questionable outcome - a struggle that therefore is genuinely interesting and affecting - Jasper is also humiliated by the trauma of having no privacy of thought from the smugly superior Edward, who never exhibits any qualms about violation of privacy through deliberate mind-reading (he is able to tune out the ability when he so wishes, which apparently is not very often). Jasper possesses a unique superhuman gift of his own, though: the ability to feel the moods of others and to induce calm or excitement. In contrast to Edward, he seems to use the gift unselfishly, out of kindness. Still, like Edward’s it is a trait that deserves much closer critical scrutiny than it receives in either book or film, but then, one should probably not turn to Twilight with the expectation of anything very deep about either the vampiric or the human condition.

 

Jasper’s spouse, Alice, is the only female character in the book who plays a proactive, positive, and influential role. Capable, loyal, friendly, and gifted with certain precognitive powers , she is acknowledged as someone who knows how to protect herself and others; in the film, she fights in the final battle scene. The supportive and loving quality of her relationship with Jasper, in which each recognises the other as an equal (film clip of a fight practice session, from Eclipse), is intensely alluring, heightened on screen by the presence and chemistry of the actors (Ashley Greene and Jackson Rathbone). I was not joking when I stated that I wish Twilight would have told their stories instead. As Edward explains, “Alice and Jasper are two very rare creatures. They both developed a conscience, as we refer to it, with no outside guidance. Jasper belonged to another ... family, a very different kind of family. He became depressed, and he wandered on his own. Alice found him ” (289-290). Alice’s backstory is no less haunting than Jasper’s, but their backgrounds are only fleetingly touched on in this first novel of the saga. The hope of finding out more about Jasper and Alice was the sole reason I endured sitting through the film adaptation of Eclipse with its horrendously sordid triangle drama (begun in New Moon). Luckily for me, the pair finally received more screen time in that third installment.

 

While I consider Twilight severely problematic, in some respects it is an accomplished enough debut novel. At this early stage in her career Stephenie Meyer obviously possessed a lot more imagination and ideas than technical writing skills or psychological perceptiveness. For all that, Meyer’s prose flows smoothly and pleasantly, her grip on conveying emotion, atmosphere, and natural setting are good, and she demonstrates an instinct for propelling the story forward in the style of a pageturner. The pacing is better in the first part of the book than the midsection, where it drags, and the ending, where the book really fell apart for me in too many ways to count. Plotting and understanding of dramatic structure are feeble. Still, tense set-ups full of emotional and psychological potential keep the story going, and humour lightens the angst at regular intervals. I can see how the overall smoothness of the storytelling can make for compelling escapist fiction for adults and be involving enough to be addictive for young readers, who no doubt fill the voids in the writing with the powerfulness of their own imaginations. Nevertheless, a mature reader hoping for something even moderately insightful and nuanced from a story about young love and death may be put off by the shallowness and toxicity of the narrative. For me, personally, this is one of the rare cases where the film worked overwhelmingly better than the book.

If or when Stephenie Meyer’s writing voice outgrows the self-indulgent amateurism on display in Twilight and she puts more thought into her themes and the messages her narratives convey, I may yet become interested in returning to her work to see how she develops the talents that every now and then make Twilight glimmer. (Indeed, while I am definitely not ready to try another of her books anytime soon, I have heard good things about The Host.) But my verdict on her first book must be summed up thus: an original scenario brimming with thought-provoking conflicts turned into a regrettably simplistic novel by immature, narcissistic storytelling.

Georgia: The Girl King by Meg Clothier

 

For lovers of mainstream historical fiction who have been pining for a holiday from Tudor courts and the French Revolution, The Girl King* by Meg Clothier at first glance promises an exciting change of pace. Set amid the Caucasus mountains between the Black and Caspian Seas and featuring a queen regnant whose life easily rivals that of her contemporary, Eleanor of Aquitaine, The Girl King seems bound to entertain by merit of its fascinating subject alone. Surprisingly, the author decides her historical material is not sufficiently eye-popping and, in her own words, “massages” it to further her adventure yarn. Had Meg Clothier redirected such efforts to the frequently draft-like shallowness of her debut novel, The Girl King might have resulted in a read more worthy of its heroine, one of the great mediaeval luminaries.

 

1177**. When King Giorgi III accepts that he will produce no male heir, his elder daughter’s life catapults into unprecedented prominence. No woman has ever ruled Georgia, a soldierly society riven by hostile neighbours and blood-soaked internal power struggles. The nobles revolt.

A girl still, Tamar is sent into hiding for her own protection. Adapting to the rudimentary way of life in the mountains fosters her self-reliance, a quality that is tested when betrayal destroys her safehaven. The mountains also acquaint her with Soslani, an adolescent Alan nobleman whose patronising ways amuse and irritate her even as peril leads to an unexpected bond.

On her father’s death, Tamar’s survival rests in the hands of noblemen who have long resented Giorgi III’s tyranny and refuse to be led by a female sovereign. Only grievous concessions can save her. But what will that mean for her country – and her heart?

 

Warning: This post contains discussions of historical material and plot points that some readers are likely to consider spoiler territory.

 

“The Most High Queen Tamar, by the Will of Our Lord, King of Kings and Queen of Queens of Abkhazians, Kartvelians, Ranians, Kakhetians and Armenians, Shirvanshah and Shahanshah and Sovereign of All the East and West”, “Glory of the World and Faith”, “Champion of the Messiah”.

 

Thus was Queen Tamar (T'amar, Thamar, Tamara) the Great of Georgia (Bagratid dynasty) eulogised by her contemporaries. The dramatic circumstances of her life and times really call for an epic, and that is the first challenge faced by The Girl King. Despite the trade paperback format the book is short: just over three hundred pages of sparse text in a largish font. A disappointment but not automatically a problem is that the story only covers the earliest period of her accession, not how the kingdom of Georgia (Kartvelia/Sakartvelo) transformed into an empire under her rule or the cultural, scientific, political and religious feats that mark her trailblazing (and mythologised) reign as the Golden Age of Georgian (Kartvelian) history. Thirdly, the storyline shifts between two parallel coming-of-age narratives that eventually tangle in a coltish romantic thread which further narrows the scope of an already pared-down plot. In consequence, the trials and triumphs that made Tamar a legend in her own lifetime and earned her canonization by the Georgian Orthodox Church and an enduring place at the forefront of Georgian history, receive short shrift. (The author note does not mention whether a sequel will be forthcoming; the style of the epilogue would suggest not.)

 

Clothier attempts to resolve some of these limitations by manipulating historical chronology, which she blurs or conflates outright. For example, whereas in reality more than a decade separated Tamar’s second marriage (1187/1189) from a later, renowned military victory (c.1202/1205), in the novel that battle has been moved to the period between her two marriages. The plot climax involves another major fusion of separate events. Likewise, during the last six years of her father’s reign Tamar apprenticed by his side as co-regent (he crowned her in 1178), yet the impression given by the over-simplified, episodic plotline of The Girl King – which carefully refrains from the inclusion of dates as time markers – is of a span of perhaps a year, when in fact her second coronation, on Giorgi’s death, took place in 1184. Tellingly, when a character who has been absent from the story suddenly returns to the scene as the parent of two children, my first reaction was a confused “wait...what?”

 

This vagueness is due not only to the interference with chronology but to a style of storytelling that is spare to the point of sketchy. The downside of a plot structure and stylistic texture that are the equivalent of coarse linen is that the rough, loose weave cannot accommodate fine detail. What is gained in vigour and an atmosphere that accentuates the starkness of the setting has to be weighed against what is lost in complexity. Unfortunately, the sort of deep focus and close observation that would provide nuance and subtlety is entirely missing from Clothier’s story. In terms of a character study of Tamar readers have to content themselves with a charcoal outline.

 

Sometimes authors appear uncertain of how much they can rely on their readers’ ability to put two and two together. Clothier exhibits no such concern, but it leads to the opposite problem, namely a dearth of information that would illuminate character behaviour and histories. For example, it is stated in the book that Tamar’s aunt, Rusudan, had been banished from court, but the reason remains unclear. (Her marriages, which seem relevant in the context of Georgian attitudes to the Seljuks, are never mentioned.) The cold pragmatism that characterises the women’s relationship in the book is plausible yet neglects to address the curiosity that the historic Tamar named her daughter Rusudan. It may have been in honor of Tamar’s sister, another Rusudan, but the very existence of that sister is apparently based on a single historical source (according to Anthony Eastmond - see books of related interest, below). Similarly, Tamar’s mother is an extremely distant character in The Girl King, weepy and withdrawn, but it is up to the reader to scrape together haphazard crumbs of secondary information in order to be able to even speculate about a cause.

 

In addition, there are problematic instances of the telling-rather-than-showing-variety. No background is shown for the poisonous relationship between Tamar and her younger sister (in the book called Susa), but an out-of-the-blue confession about sibling rivalry, very late in the story, is supposed to make readers dismiss the sisters’ previous absence of any compassionate feelings toward each other and believe in their instantaneous dearest-of-friends-attitude. Then again, throughout the story there is a marked lack of character introspection, of attention to motives and feelings. Characters brusquely forge ahead with whatever they are doing next without pausing to dwell on what has gone before. At best, it keeps the pace brisk and indicates a rough, no-nonsense society; at worst, it tends to make the characters seem uniformly naïve and emotionally detached.

 

Coldness is actually a pervasive theme in the novel, and is particularly striking where characters’ family relationships are concerned. The ties between husbands, wives, daughters, mothers, sons, fathers, sisters, uncles, aunts, and cousins are characterised by feelings of disdain, hatred, fear, numbness, resentment, coldness, rivalry, aloofness, and casual murderousness. The implication is that power battles (emotional as well as political) are playing a part in this hostile dynamic, but as the pattern is given no analytical treatment whatsoever, nor being compared to or contrasted with outside enemies or threats to the country, it produces the presumably unintended effect of dousing reader sympathy as well as affecting believability. In regards to the latter, Tamar and Soslani have not a single model for a loving, sexually intimate relationship (which never occurs to either of them) or even an unselfish, close bond with another family member, yet this has no psychological consequences as they gravitate toward each other.

 

The theme of coldness succeeds much better when applied to the physical environment, where it creates strong atmosphere (Clothier’s spare prose occasionally spurts into lyricism when descriptions of nature are involved). Icy mountain winds and the fresh air of the plains are a constant in the story, breezing through rooms that are infallibly draughty, cold, and low on comforts. Things appear crude, makeshift, the splendourous sophistication of Constantinople by turns envied and disdained by a population that equates war and simplicity with manliness, and peace and finery with weakness. In a parallel to the open-air settings of most scenes, Tamar’s spirit and personality rebel against containment. She is always reaching for the out-of-doors experience, the unshuttered window, the untrammelled manner of dress, while other noblewomen are shown huddled by fires or covered in veils, their tastes attuned to what men and women alike judge to be appropriately feminine pursuits and concerns. Palace life is an environment in which Tamar feels stifled but she eventually learns that for a female ruler birth, courage, and ability are not enough, that the mastery of court diplomacy is key to her survival.

 

Tamar descends from a line of feared, autocratic rulers and has grown up in an environment of constant warfare and bloodshed. Fighting men are idolised, women dismissed as weaklings. In her childhood Tamar imbibes battle stories like milk: “She would sit on the floor at the feet of a rheumy old Kipchak soldier, arms gripped tight about her knees, as each deliciously bloody episode made her flinch and cower. Death came like a wind from the east. It blew men’s heads from their shoulders. Their skulls were like balls in a playground. Their bodies like tree trunks stacked in a forest” (p. 2; author's italics). This environment sets the tone for a female protagonist who differs from the typical historical fiction heroine in refreshing ways. No fake-tough heroine, she starts out adventurous and independent, strong-willed and unafraid, with a proud, un-neurotic attitude to the perks of royal rank. She will sneak out to watch a battle, take up hunting and fishing, wrestle would-be captors, and – a unique experience for a heroine in modern commercial fiction? – actually relishes the spectacle of a hunt that is really a competition based on mass-slaughter of animals. This unapologetic honesty and straightforwardness made her a treat to read, and I could hardly wait for her to come into her own on the throne. Bewilderingly, however, about halfway through The Girl King her personality and involvement in the plot wilt, and she ends up bereft of every trait that made her character unique and vibrant.

 

Instead it is Sos (Davit/David Soslan/i of Alania, north of Georgia) who inherits the part of the energetic doer, the protagonist at the centre of adventure, whereas Tamar’s character retreats into resignation in the face of unappetising destiny and assumes an unexpected passivity. Dictated by plot rather than character development, this jarring change is symptomatic of a larger problem. While The Girl King introduces the reader to an amazing historical character, the bare-bones narrative promises much more than it is ultimately able to deliver. Time and again the plot seems poised on the brink of exploding into exciting fireworks but invariably bated breath becomes a sigh as one waits in vain for the “big” story to develop.

 

At the same time it becomes clear that The Girl King is not the novel to turn to for any kind of insight into a mediaeval female personage in power. Here we have instead the folkloric image of a heroine whose quest to secure her queenship is a romantic adventure tale that gradually casts her as a conventional damsel in distress while the hero is assigned the juicy parts. This is an inevitable development because the author insists on keeping the story focus squarely on swashbuckling escapades even when that choice leads the narrative away from Tamar, who as queen is no longer able to enjoy the same physical freedom as before. With increasing frequency the amiable and perpetually adolescent Soslani seemed to take over the story entirely, causing me to reflect sombrely on the questionable relevance of the novel’s title. He is an instrumental historical figure (it is speculated that he may have been a distant blood relation of Tamar and some historians believe that Tamar’s aunt Rusudan served as tutor and patron to Soslani), but his impulsiveness, innocence, simplicity, and air of immaturity in the novel (he is said to be in his seventeenth spring in 1177, p. 14-5), where he never seems to graduate from boyhood into mature adulthood, prevented me from being able to reconcile his Peter Panesque traits with the man of exceptional qualities evidenced by the historical record.

 

Meanwhile, Tamar, whose ears and eyes have always been open in the past and who has armed herself with knowledge about the economy and trade of her country, is depicted as stoically resigned to obscurity, and certainly never seen exploiting her expertise – even though her financial acumen, political prowess, and religious and cultural patronage were the very weapons by which the historical Tamar was eventually able to defeat opposition and cement her rule. Her altered and difficult circumstances would certainly warrant changes in outlook and behaviour, but the problem is that her fierce, quick-witted, strategising personality has disappeared, replaced by a demure, accepting limpness. The minimal character development skips personal growth which would reveal evidence of the intellectual qualities and abilities that made her a legend in her own time. Tamar’s transition from ignored and bullied successor to commanding queen regnant is related through a series of simplistic episodes that note the change in the attitude of nobles and palace officials without credibly showing how and why. (Ordinary Georgians (Kartvelebi) are largely invisible in The Girl King, just like its heroine is barely seen thinking about her people and country – reminding me rather alarmingly of those regency romance dukes who spend no time in the House of Lords or administering their vast estates.) A pivotal scene pairs cardboard characterisation with a level of psychological credibility that might convince a 10-year old reader but made this adult cringe at the naïvety. I felt I was being fed the shakiest of skeletal drafts and, even in this age of notorious publishing shortcuts, was compelled to wonder what on earth happened to the editor. Compounding the decline, it is at this point that the author heavyhandedly inserts a ridiculous Woe-Is-Me-All-Is-Lost-Moment between the lovers and decides to alter the facts of major historical events. I lost what remained of my investment in the story, dragged myself through the last pages, and moved on to search for the real Tamar elsewhere.

 

Nevertheless, a few scenes with interesting (if ultimately under-used) narrative potential show promise for more complex character building in Clothier’s future writing. The contradictory forces in Tamar’s attitude to violence is a particularly intriguing aspect of her personality in view of her later reign (not covered in the novel). For all her admiration of blood-glory, for all her physical bravery and bemoaning that as a girl she can have no battle experience, for all that as queen she does not shrink from declaring war and riding out with her troops, when she actually does kill a character by her own hand she does so only out of charity. Her reaction to the punishment of enemies or traitors and the treatment of corpses for once presages the historical Tamar’s actions: a ban on the death penalty and torture. I would have loved to see an exploration of the beliefs, motives, and strong Christian faith that on one hand led her to show compassion to her personal enemies and on the other, having turned the tide of foreign aggression, made her relentlessly drive the expansion of Georgian borders and national influence. This is also, after all, the ruler who helped found the (so called) Empire of Trebizond and established Georgia’s military supremacy in Asia Minor.

 

The brevity of the novel’s page count, the sham chronology, and the love-adventure angle dispense with a host of questions and important historical details. Here are a few that nagged me. Did the Georgian nobles really revolt only because they resisted a female sovereign on principle and an opportunist saw his chance to seize the throne (Clothier’s version), or was it also an attempt to reclaim privileges lost under the tyrannical rule of Tamar’s father (whose own legal claim to the throne had previously been contested), and perhaps even a demand for a share in power (as seen in England some years later)? A circumstance disguised by Clothier’s twisting of chronology to make the sole threat appear to come from outside Georgia’s borders, turning her heroine and hero into rallying figures in a grand finale, is that the time of Tamar’s accession was certainly not the only occasion of insurgence against her. And for a reader interested in women’s history, the political influence of Tamar’s aunt Rusudan begs the question of the legal status of women in Georgian society not only in matters of inheritance but especially as pertains to governance and diplomacy. Why, for example, are the nobles in The Girl King willing to be guided by this woman if Tamar’s sex is the strongest objection they have to the legitimacy of her rule? Again, an issue which is never broached in the context of the novel’s culminating campaign is the impact of the Crusades on Georgia’s Muslim neighbours. It illustrates the over-simplification of the story but also leaves out any indication of the level of diplomatic engagement involved in Tamar’s future handling of relations with Muslim states and territories. For example, after Saladin’s capture of Jerusalem, Tamar sent envoys to the sultan, resulting in the restoration of Georgian possessions there and unique privileges for Georgian pilgrims to the Holy Sepulchre. (See, for example, the reference in A History Of The Crusades: The Impact Of The Crusades In The Near East, by Setton, Zacour, and Hazard, University Of Wisconsin Press, 1985, p.88, and East And West In The Crusader States (Acta Of The Congress Held At Hernen Castle September 2000, vol. III) edited by K. Ciggaar and H. Teule, Peeters Publishers, 2003, p. 37-9.) Finally, the novel’s exclusive emphasis on the grittier and bloodier aspects of life in late twelfth-century Georgia easily gives the impression that the country was a cultural backwater, whereas, as noted earlier in this post, this was an era of major advances in science and art. It seems worth recalling that the Bagratids' association with the Imperial court at Constantinople ensured regular contact with the most cosmopolitan centre in Europe (for example, a century earlier, Maria of Alania, daughter of King Bagrat IV of Georgia, had married the Roman Emperor Michael VII; and the wife of Andronikos I or his son is also presumed to have been a Georgian princess, a possibility on which Clothier’s plot capitalises), and that Tamar’s economic and political ambitions brought even closer Georgian interaction than before with the Frankish and Muslim cultures of Outremer.

 

History in a work of historical fiction is, however, more than the sum of its historical facts and depth. Do the issues I have brought forward mean that Clothier’s novel fails to fulfill arguably the foremost criterion of (commercial) historical fiction: that of immersing the reader in another time and place? No. History in The Girl King may be thin and fantasy-imbued but there is a dinstinctiveness to the setting that creates an authentic atmosphere. It is seen, for example, in the co-existence of old local beliefs and Christian faith that keep characters respectful of the pagan spirit world they accept alongside Church teachings.

 

Another likeable aspect is the enthusiasm of the storytelling. The prose does fumble a bit uncertainly between simple and overwritten, and the jejune dialogue too often states the obvious. But there is a rough energy about the story that at least in the beginning trumps the awkward style of a first-time novelist. Clothier’s voice has a robust personality and there is something unadorned and honest about her language that is appealingly fresh and adds colour to the setting. At times I fancied hearing faint echoes of chansons de geste but the treatment of the subject-matter overwhelmingly harks back to classic boys’ adventure books.

 

And that brings me to the issue of the target audience for the The Girl King. Tales of growing up are found in literature for all ages, but an author who neglects to settle on an appropriate mode of presentation impairs the reader’s ability to engage and connect with a novel. Although neither the cover nor the imprint classify The Girl King as such, this is really a Young Adult-type book. I say “type” because the treatment of its coming-of-age themes seesaws between a style that sometimes seems too youthful even for older teens and several (if brief) scenes of brutality that would not be out of place in a laddish sort of adult historical adventure fiction. Coupled with a few inclusions of sexual innuendo and marital bedroom politics that contrast with the adolescent tone of the story and its lack of depth, the ultimate result is, audience-wise, a mess.

 

Since The Girl King is a work of fiction one cannot fault the author for the absence of a reading list or other recommendations for further information. A map and a concise historical note regarding liberties taken with factual events are appended. Nonetheless, in the case of an intriguing subject that is probably not well known to Clothier’s English-language audience – in the United Kingdom and North America the names most often associated with Georgia seem to be Stalin and Khachaturian – some pointers to resources besides The Knight (Man) In The Panther’s (Tiger's) Skin would have been useful. (Clothier includes the author, Shota Rustaveli, of this celebrated epic poem among her secondary characters, although in the novel his role as treasurer excludes anything but the coyest of hints to his subsequent literary fame).

 

I have spent much space outlining what this novel is not, perhaps because I am puzzled by the author’s intentions. Presumably she wished to bring attention to a historical figure deserving of wider international recognition. Indeed, enabling readers to discover Tamar may be the single most gratifying thing about The Girl King; she belongs not only alongside mediaeval female sovereigns such as Isabella of Castile, Urraca, Empress Matilda, and Queen Melisende of Jerusalem, but in any general survey of mediaeval rulership in Western Eurasia. Meg Clothier’s choice of what to tell, though, risks making Tamar’s story sound mundane – a somewhat adventurous yet many-times told everyday reality for mediaeval women of high rank. The book’s storyline re-writes history even as it declines to move beyond the obvious headlines and explore what made Tamar’s queenship extraordinary and the period she lived in an exceptional era in Georgian history. That is a missed opportunity, to say the least: if the life of Tamar is worth a novelisation, then surely it is worth more than this cursory glimpse. But as making such choices is a fiction writer’s prerogative, execution becomes all-important. Unfortunately, despite an arresting voice the actual storytelling is raw and at times painfully juvenile, suffering from inadequate revision, inconsistent, paltry characterisation, and haziness about its target audience. All things considered, The Girl King is passable historical fiction, an uneven debut by a writer who has not quite yet learnt to harness her talents but whose enthusiasm for her story shines through. With the novelty of such a setting, it may be enough for many readers, particularly those whose enjoyment of light, romantic historical fiction intersects with YA themes.

 

* The novel’s title makes creative use of the Georgian language: “Georgian knows no distinction of genders; accordingly, Thamar as a reigning sovereign was entitled mep'e (that is, king or queen regnant). This has sometimes been erroneously interpreted by modern historians as her having been proclaimed a 'king'.”

** Tamar is believed to have been born around 1160 (her parents married circa 1155). The precise records of her birth and death (1207/1210/13) as well as her burial place have been lost due to wars and invasions over the centuries. In calendars of Orthodox saints her birthdate is given as 1166, which, going by the childishness of Tamar's character in the first part of the novel, seems the year Clothier has decided to adopt.

 

Excerpt

(Century, a Random House imprint, 2011, p. 57):

"The horse wound down through the storm bed, until the ground levelled out and the way widened. The sun was not yet ready to show itself, but night was vanishing fast, the darkness evaporating, nothingness disappearing into nothing, leaving the strange colourless non-light that shrouds the world before dawn.

The Kart plain opened up before them, the grass bowing low before the light easterly wind that sprang up with the day. They climbed down and let the horse rest while they watched the sun race free, turning the land brown and green, colouring their faces pink and gold.

Tamar's hair wandered over her eyes. Her lower lip was sun-blistered. Her hand went to her shoulder, she reddened and her eyebrows bunched together, a little furrow in her forehead.

'Why?'

Sos grinned. 'Because I could. Because I wanted to.' His smile faded a little. 'And because of Aton.'

'I'll make them pay for that. For Albina too.'

His lips twitched. 'You. A girl?'

So he'd worked that out.

'Yes, me,' she nodded firmly. 'With help from my father.'

'Is he a rich man? Powerful? Would I know him from court?'

It was Tamar's turn to smile.

'I am sure of it. I am Tamar. You have saved the King's daughter.'"

 

Books of related interest: Royal Imagery In Medieval Georgia by Anthony Eastmond studies “the relationship between art and power” in the kingdom over several centuries, focussing on Queen Tamar (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998). New Constantines: The Rhythm of Imperial Renewal in Byzantium, 4th-13th Centuries (Papers from the Twenty-Sixth Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, Scotland, 1992), edited by Paul Magdalino contains the essay “Royal Renewal In Georgia: The Case Of Queen Tamar”, also by Anthony Eastmond. Again, Eastmond contributed the essay “Gender And Orientalism In Georgia In The Age Of Queen Tamar” in Women, Men, And Eunuchs: Gender In Byzantium, edited by Elizabeth James (Routledge, 1997), where he “looks at the idea of the female king and how gender affected the construction of kingship both in medieval Georgia and in the perceptions of that rule in later centuries” (p. XIX). A frequently cited general work that covers this period is History Of The Georgian Nation by Kalistrat Salia, translated by Katharine Vivian (1983), whereas Historical Dictionary Of Georgia by Alexander Mikaberidze (Scarecrow Press, 2007) contains "a chronology, glossary, introduction, appendixes, maps, bibliography, and hundreds of cross-referenced dictionary entries on important persons, places, events, and institutions and significant political, economic, social, and cultural aspects".

 

This is my fifth entry in the Historical Fiction Challenge.

 

France: Liszt’s Kiss by Susanne Dunlap

 

French Romanticism reached its zenith in the 1830s, an era of political revolutions and artistic re-invention. In Liszt’s Kiss by Susanne Dunlap a handful of the luminaries of that age mingle with fictional protagonists in a story of infatuation and deception in the shadow of the catastrophic cholera outbreak in Paris in the spring of 1832. A novel dressed as historical fiction with a dash of mystery, its immature and self-centred principal character frequently derails an already precarious plot into a narrative style reminiscent of Young Adult romance. Although sections that demonstrate the effects of music on the characters’ emotions contain a scene that held me spellbound, such psychological insight is not carried over to the larger story, which too often is flattened by the author limply telling the reader what characters are feeling. In the final analysis the book’s greatest mystery, to me, is how a setting so charged with dramatic opportunity can be rendered so pointless.

 

1832. When the cholera pandemic reaches Paris and sweeps away the life of her mother among its thousands of victims, seventeen year-old noblewoman Anne de Barbier-Chouant’s former courtier father locks the room in which the family piano stands and forbids Anne from practicing her music. Already locked out from his affections, Anne gratefully seizes the friendship extended by her mother’s friend, the Comtesse Marie d’Agoult, a music lover and hostess of famous salons. When the Comtesse arranges to secretly have young Hungarian virtuoso Franz Liszt become Anne’s piano teacher, the girl’s romantic imagination soars. She barely notices medical student Pierre Talon, thinking of him only as the saviour of her cousin Armand’s life.

To Pierre, however, Anne is a vision of loveliness he cannot forget as he toils day and night in the overflowing cholera wards of the Hôtel-Dieu. So when the Comtesse d’Agoult asks him for an unusual and dangerous favour for the sake of her protégée he complies, hoping it will help clear up the mystery surrounding Anne’s home and family life. For while the formerly splendid mansion is crumbling into poverty, misery, and oblivion under the despotic rule of Anne’s bitter and taciturn father, the marquis, it begins to appear as if the very lives of those who inhabit the mansion are threatened by its secrets.

 

If one is looking for a sentimental romantic drama breathlessly played out against a piquant historical background, Liszt’s Kiss may very well satisfy and indeed thrill. I have read my share and often enjoyed them, and as the name of my blog shows I have yet to tire of romantic themes. But I picked up this novel based on its claim to be “a rich evocation of a remarkable period as seen through the eyes of a sensitive young artist”, a story set “at the height of the Romantic era in Paris...with the ominous presence of Paris’s most deadly epidemic looming over every turbulent event” (back cover blurb). I hoped that the author’s past as a pianist would bring a unique dimension to her treatment of the artistic psyche and interpretation of a fascinating artistic climate. On these points the novel failed dismally to convince or compel.

 

If a story turns out to have compensations, disappointed expectations are not necessarily cause for lasting discontent. In this case, I perceived that Susanne Dunlap has plenty of raw talent that bodes well for her growth into a popular storyteller. One of her most obvious strengths is the ability to develop a complex yet neatly designed mystery plot that even far-fetched motivations and character naïvetés did not ruin for me. And when she takes her characters out of their heads and propels them into physical action she often does so with verve and a great instinct for relevant and lively detail. Happily, too, her approach to historical authenticity anchors the plot in historical reality, fleshing out the bones of her story with judiciously applied tidbits based on in-depth research. Regrettably, my appreciation and even admiration of these qualities was not enough to make this run-of-the-mill coming-of-age story that has nothing to say about the time it is set in more than periodically enjoyable.

 

When the cholera pandemic reached France in early 1832 it struck a country that was already in turbulence from food shortages and rising costs due to years of failed harvests and other economic factors. A revolution two years earlier had replaced the newly restored Bourbon monarchy with another, more populist branch which favoured the bourgeoisie and was bitterly resented by republicans and Legitimists (supporters of the Bourbons) alike. Abroad, France fought for an increased share in the colonial onslaughts, and orientalism captured the imaginations of people at home. Artists and intellectuals, too, were in transition, breaking the bonds that formerly had defined them as servants of the aristocracy and re-inventing themselves as free entrepreneurs. The Romantics espoused the idea of “art for art’s sake” and saw genius in originality and individuality. It was a period where extraordinary creative vitality, extravagance, and eccentricity mingled with social and political instability and violence. Meanwhile, Paris retained a mediaeval, maze-like, damp and unsanitary town plan in which sewage emptied into open street drains – in other words, perfect conditions for disease, particularly with the onset of warm weather. In the months the cholera ravaged France it claimed 100,000 victims, a fifth of them in Paris, where in April alone 13,000 people perished.

 

This, roughly, is the complex context for the Paris in which Liszt’s Kiss is set but of which the story gives only a threadbare hint. For example, the Marquis de Barbier-Chouant, Anne’s father and a Bourbon courtier, is out of favour with the new monarchy. That is literally all we learn of the political situation. When the story concludes we are in June 1832, but despite the prominence in the novel of a protagonist who is a medical student, there is not one word about the student-led uprising in Paris in the first week of June that attempted to overturn the government.

 

Doctor-to-be Pierre volunteers in a hospital and through him we see the what cholera looks like and the helplessness of a medical community that had no idea of the cause, cure for, or prevention of the disease. In the Reading Group Guide at the back of my edition (Touchstone trade paperback, 2007) it is stated that “love and death are major themes in Liszt’s Kiss”. It is true that the (off-page) death of Anne’s mother from cholera sets the story in motion, that the mystery thread involves the possibility of impending murder, and that sensitive readers may flinch at the descriptions of the cholera wards. Yet the storyline more often seems to exploit cholera as a spicy background instead of a running foreground commentary on society or death. It is correct that people continued to attend parties and charity concerts, but Parisians also left their city and country in droves – apparently, 120,000 passports were issued at the town hall. In Liszt’s Kiss, not one character cowers in their house, afraid of being infected through contact with strangers. On the contrary, less than a week after her mother’s death, Anne pouts about being shut up in the house and runs off to a concert. She goes for walks and drives during which we neither hear of nor see the epidemic. It is explained that the poor suspect they are being poisoned, for it is mainly the lower classes who are affected, and the characters discuss newspaper articles which describe mob violence against scapegoats. The characters themselves, however, never experience any of this frantic atmosphere of panic and paranoia and so for this reader “cholera” became an abstract concept that was paraded for emotional effect when the plot made it convenient but otherwise ignored.

 

But the biggest problem, to me, is the way the novel takes one of the most famous Romantics and one of the most infamous affairs of the period and reduces them to a vehicle for giving a teenager cause for puppy love angst. There is nothing wrong with choosing a narrow scope for a story – for example, the romance genre specialises in tight focus on the developing emotional relationship of a couple. But in order to give such a story substance, it is, I think, generally a good idea to delve into the chosen themes with all the more intensity and depth. The central obsession of the principal characters in Liszt’s Kiss is “love” or more accurately, infatuation and lust. The exploration of it, however, is as superficial, cool, and vague as a reflection in a foxed mirror. Likewise, we learn nothing about what the Romantics stood for, what they wanted to convey with their art, why the movement flourished at this time – even though Dunlap blends several famous names into her story: writers de Musset and Heine, painter Delacroix, musicians Liszt and Chopin, salonnière d’Agoult. These are artists and intellectuals who revolutionised the concept of art and created, debated, loved, and fought their way into the Western cultural canon. What does Dunlap have to say about them? That Liszt was able to write down other composers’ music scores from memory, that Chopin played so quietly that audiences had to strain their ears, that Musset had a flirty way with words, that Heine wrote down his impressions of the cholera-ravaged city, that Delacroix smoked opium, and that d’Agoult’s jealousies got the better of her sense of compassion. Oh, and how a pianist places her hands on the keys. Nice trivia, but far from “a rich evocation of a remarkable period”.

 

While the author has obviously conducted serious research into the aspects necessary for her mystery plot, her grasp of general details is less sure – and historical fiction purists should note that to accommodate her story, Dunlap has moved the first meeting and subsequent affair of Franz Liszt and Marie d’Agoult from 1833 to 1832. Carriage terminology (broughams, chariots) is off, as is attire (Anne wears hoop skirts), proper address, French etiquette including mourning etiquette, and the age at which French parents were legally able to interfere with any marriage contracted by their children. Things that raised my eyebrows include this statement: “Anne had not been in company enough to understand the subtleties of etiquette and propriety” (41). She is the daughter of a marquis, has been raised for seventeen years by a courtier father and a mother who hostesses brilliant parties and dinners, yet neither parent has instructed her in basics that every child of the nobility would have been expected to know in order not to disgrace their family? Am I to understand that, prior to the misfortunes that hit her family, she never once was introduced to a single adult acquaintance and that she failed to absorb common customs and courtesies? Apparently. As mentioned above, she attends a theatre concert within a week of her mother’s death, not even in a discreet fashion but sitting in a private box with a well-known society hostess. Then, “almost a month” later she has set off mourning and dresses for a party in “a pearl grey satin evening gown” (73). If I recall correctly, in nineteenth-century France a mother’s death called for six months of mourning, the first three in deep mourning.

 

In fact, Anne was in almost every respect a problematic character for me. With the exception of a promising start, whenever the story was told from her point of view my credulity and patience dropped several notches. Seventeen years old, she admittedly has an excuse for behaving like a hormonal teenager, but her shallowness and lack of empathy or concern for others prevented me from seeing her as the wounded character the author intended (according to the interview at the back of the book). Moreover, Anne was not the only protagonist who lost my sympathy. Their various hair-raising thoughts (179, 190) and self-serving actions left me with increased feelings of distaste and disgust for this bunch of dizzyingly callous, silly, and thin characters. I am afraid I began to see Liszt’s Kiss as a comedy of misunderstandings and deceptions that mistakes itself for grand drama, one that treats the emotional travails of its characters with such lack of insight that any chance for genuine pathos slithers into melodrama.

 

Purely for the energy, warmth, and enthusiasm he brings to the often anemic tone of the story, Franz Liszt (Liszt Ferenc(z)) was one of the saving graces of the novel for me. Twenty-one years of age, a brilliant piano player whose genius is yet to be fully discovered, the physical description of him as imposingly tall, handsome, and golden-blond reminded me more of Julian Sands’s interpretation of Liszt in the film Impromptu than of the portraits. Despite his prominence in the story Dunlap’s version of him does not extend to a multi-dimensional portrayal, but she succeeds in sketching an impassioned, reckless, and inspiring nature that makes the other characters seem pale and lifeless by comparison. In a superb scene (which I assume gave the idea for the novel’s title), Liszt is guiding Anne through an E-major study by Chopin. Had the rest of the book been written with the same power and imagination, Liszt’s Kiss would have earned a very different write-up from me. It gave me goose-flesh. I almost forgave the ludicrous plot contrivances to make Anne believe he is in love with her, which make him seem absurdly dense and irrational.

 

One of the virtues of the novel is that it pulls out Marie d’Agoult from the sidelines of history. In the interview section of the book the author says that she “didn’t want to write a fictionalized treatment” of Liszt and d’Agoult’s affair. In inventing her own version of the beginnings of their mutual attraction she does exactly that, however. Tired of Anne, I rather welcomed it. The future couple’s scenes together are on a different narrative plane from those involving Anne, and benefit from the nuances of their more mature characters. D’Agoult was an eminent salonnière who went on to create a career for herself as a reviewer and journalist, authored a remarkable history of the 1848 Revolution as well as a roman-à-clef, and familiarised French audiences with many foreign intellectuals. I thought it a pity, therefore, that Dunlap’s Marie shows no indication of the influential personage she was to become. In Liszt’s Kiss the picture of her as a salon hostess consists of directing servants regarding food and determining the order of appearance of the performers she has invited. Her intelligence, involvement in social issues, and political acumen find no place in the novel since her sole preoccupation is with her forbidden attraction for Liszt (at twenty-eight, she is married with two children). Aurore Dudevant, who in 1832 adopted her famous literary pseudonym, George Sand, does not make an appearance in the book, but Marie d’Agoult’s alleged jealousy and spitefulness against Sand have definitely left a mark on Dunlap’s in other respects compassionate portrayal of the Comtesse.

 

I suspect Pierre Talon is meant to embody the Romantic soul. I thought him a sympathetic character but distressingly naive. He falls head over heels in love with Anne at first glance and it seems there is nothing he would not do for her, including burglary and theft, simply because a stranger tells him this is necessary in order to safeguard Anne who, of course, must not know about it. Since until the end of the novel the pair do not conduct a single private conversation about anything personal I am relieved to report that I liked the way the author resolved the question of how to give their non-relationship a romantic yet believable ending. (No, that is not a plot spoiler unless I have failed to make it clear that I categorise Liszt’s Kiss as romance-y fiction, not literary fiction. In that case, I apologise.) I cannot say the same for the preposterous machinations of other characters to force a different outcome.

 

Dunlap’s prose flows smoothly but if the language is meant to evoke the mood and style of the Romantics, it did not work for me. Some of the character descriptions and phrases may well have been borrowed from actual, surviving correspondence, but expressions that perhaps sounded lyrical back then are today clichés that will only work if the context in which they are used has been carefully framed. “Her presence had been overpoweringly seductive, her eyes deep wells of mystery, tantalizingly liquid, maddeningly obscure” (84) is the kind of purple-tinged prose that detractors of old-style romances enjoy ridiculing. The romantic content displays a similar hue. The first time Anne (“unconscious of her own beauty”) sees Liszt and hears him play the sensations she experiences are suggestive of a girl abandoning herself to sexual ecstasy with a skilled lover, at the climax of which we read, “When his face turned fully in their direction and she thought she saw the smallest glimmer of a smile on it, Anne fainted” (38). Pierre is present and realises she has fainted. The reaction of this medical student is as follows: “the intensity of her response to the performance, her unself-conscious abandonment to the music, convinced him she might be in actual peril” (39). The last time I encountered anything similar in a genre romance was a 1970s Barbara Cartland book I read in my teens. (For anyone wondering, I examined the cover of Liszt’s Kiss. At the top of the back cover the word “fiction”, not “romance” or "young adult", is printed in faint capitals.) An unrelated irritation concerning technique was the author’s habit of repeating parts of the same scene from another character’s viewpoint. To me it added nothing and merely read as lazy writing.

 

In terms of general readability, I thought the novel improved considerably around the 100-page mark. The plot gains momentum as it progresses, and in the second half is often involving. When the mystery thread – which in the beginning consists mostly of Anne’s father scowling and being uncommunicative – moves to the foreground and involves the Office of Records and commissioner Gardive, I began to cheer up. Here is a character who could be developed into the hero of an interesting mystery series. He is sharp, smart, unsentimental, and unexpected, with an unusual job that promises plenty of opportunity for nosing out secrets and surprises. Team him up with Eugène Delacroix, a minor but amiable foil for Liszt in the novel, and Dunlap would have the makings of a Romantic-era historical novel I might actually relish. A few loose ends are left dangling at the end of Liszt’s Kiss, two involving Armand, Anne’s cousin, and as I have indicated before, many of the character actions and motivations are utterly nonsensical, yet overall I think Dunlap writes a much more dynamic mystery than romantic drama.

 

In summary, Liszt’s Kiss seemed to promise a lot more than it delivered. It is romantic, light historical fiction that offers nothing new, fresh, or insightful to a reader remotely familiar with the French Romantics. It wobbles awkwardly between YA fiction and adult fiction, and confuses sentimentality with emotion. Even so, there are alluring elements that persuade me Susanne Dunlap will be capable of more interesting work when she truly finds her style. This is her first novel for adults, although she has written several books for young adults. Based on Liszt's Kiss, her voice does seem more suited to a younger audience. Still, instead of writing her off as a not-for-me author, I am going to wait and see what happens when her next novel for adults comes out.

 

Books of related interest: Marie d’Agoult’s novel Nélida is said (I have not yet read it) to be a thinly disguised memoir of her relationship with Franz Liszt. French Salons: High Society And Political Sociability from the Old Regime to the Revolution of 1848 by Steven Kale has a self-explanatory title; it is academic and dry but informative. For a novel that explores the effect on the French populace of the 1832 cholera epidemic in much more complex fashion, see Jean Giono’s The Horseman On The Roof (Le Hussard Sur Le Toit), set in Provence. For biographies of d’Agoult and Liszt, Dunlap’s suggested reading list includes Alan Walker’s Franz Liszt: The Virtuoso Years and The Life Of Marie d’Agoult, alias Daniel Stern by Phyllis Stock-Morton.

 

Films of related interest: One of the best-known films about the Romantics is Impromptu, which paints Marie d’Agoult as petty, insecure, and insignificant. Still, it is a witty comedy I always enjoy very much, especially for Judy Davis’s humorous but unexpectedly touching portrayal of George Sand and her pursuit of Chopin (a very young Hugh Grant). In the passionately emotional and sensual The Children Of The Century (Les Enfants Du Siècle) by Diane Kurys, Juliette Binoche gives a more independent, more intense interpretation of Sand, this time through the author’s stormy relationship with Alfred de Musset (the poet who appears a few times in Liszt’s Kiss). A Song To Remember is Chopin à la 1940s Hollywood – an amusing, romanticised, glittering Technicolor production with a huffy Kalkbrenner, a gracious but forgettable Liszt (Stephen Bekassy), and an unrecognisable Sand (Merle Oberon), poised, elegant, and destructively seductive; Marie d’Agoult is nowhere to be found, alas. Jean-Paul Rappeneau’s adaptation of Giono’s novel (above), also titled The Horseman On The Roof, is a swashbuckling French adventure-romance that pairs Binoche and Olivier Martinez as a married noblewoman and a gallant Italian exile who join forces to break through quarantine barriers and escape the 1832 cholera epidemic. It is one of my favourite films.

 

This is my third entry in the Historical Fiction Challenge.

 

Germany: The Glass Minstrel by Hayden Thorne

The Glass Minstrel by Hayden Thorne is the first of my Christmas-themed reads this year. While the title is marketed as young-adult historical fiction, the first half of the book has crossover appeal that made me feel I was reading general fiction. In the second half, the plot focus veers from a story that deftly interweaves several captivating character arcs to a narrower study that seems to fumble for narrative balance. Nevertheless, with its atmospheric echo of nineteenth-century romantic writers and melancholy fairytales, the The Glass Minstrel has a sensitive, refined aesthetic that feels unique these days. Its loveliness left me with misty eyes and a wish to see more historical fiction from its author.

 

1850. Two young lovers have died, but instead of supporting the grieving families the small Bavarian town of Zirndorf gossips and points fingers. When the rumours reach fifteen-year-old Jakob Diederich, his reaction is very different, for he carries the burden of a secret that unites him with the couple in ways no one suspects.

During the busiest Christmas season in years, toymaker Abelard Bauer tremulously fashions a minstrel of blown glass, paints it to look like his lost son, then destroys the mould. Across town, Andreas Schiffer struggles to make sense of the brief life of his own, favourite child through a journal that was left behind. It chronicles the growth of a love story that should bond the two fathers but instead divides them in horror and bewilderment.

As a snowy Holy Eve draws near, its message seems lost upon the men who, blinded by pain and regret, seem only to drift farther from those around them. Tormented by feelings that by turns confuse, scare, and elate him, is there any hope for Jakob in a world where even family and friends condemn boys like him and feel shame for the kind of love that Stefan Bauer and Heinrich Schiffer shared?

 

A review of The Glass Minstrel by John at Dear Author inspired my interest in the novel. A slim trade-format book with just under two hundred pages, it explores profound themes with an acuity and delicacy that kept me engaged even when my enchantment waned into “mere” enjoyment.

While the prose is simple, even slightly repetitious at times as it details business in the toyshop or Jakob’s duties at the inn where he works, and while a few awkward paragraph transitions could have been smoothed out with sharper editing, Thorne’s writing style is to the point and beautifully readable. The tone it sets enhances the period mood and gives the setting a mythical quality. The alpine landscape and town details are sketched in with only the lightest of generic touches, furthering the impression of a place that owes less to any real location than to the villages of old, German fables and vintage Christmas cards.

Likewise, the political upheavals taking place during this period in the German states – including the Kingdom of Bavaria, where the story takes place and where King Ludwig I had been forced to abdicate in 1848 – are fleetingly noted in The Glass Minstrel but not incorporated into the plot. There seemed to be fertile potential in these rumbles, but as indicated above, the author elects to keep things universal. (The use of symbolism seems ineffectual in any case, with nothing much developing in terms of depth or meaning from the continual noting of the snowy weather or staring through windows. The description of a particular nightmare is a notable exception.) Although a plot that interacts more firmly with its social and political setting would have enriched the historical aspect – which if not wallpaper-y is still very thin – on a storytelling level it simply means that the novel’s mood stays true to that of a fable. Manners and in particular attitudes are appropriately attuned the era, however, so I never felt I was reading a dress-up contemporary or fantasy.

Nor should the absence of a strongly-defined setting be mistaken for shallowness. I have read countless books double the length of The Glass Minstrel, books targeted for adults, that achieve not half of its emotional realism, sensibility, and insight into grief, longing, pain, and love. The conflicts arise from a social context that is still familiar today, but the historical context raises the stakes further and trenchantly exposes the vulnerabilities of the situation and the gravity of the character dilemmas. These are explored with compassion that has room both for sympathetic understanding of the parents’ grappling with a sense of betrayal and for hope that bridges can be built over even the deepest abysses by love. Since I have emphasised the fairytale qualities of the novel, I would like to make it clear that no magic wand is waved here: while redemption and reconciliation is achieved by some of the characters, scandal, social ostracism, and intolerance remain issues in society at large.

The few problems I had with the book are minor, with one exception. In view of The Glass Minstrel being young-adult fiction, my issue may seem paradoxical. But as the first half evenly meshes the individual lives and relationships of the main protagonists with each other and the townspeople, the late-coming swing to an almost exclusive focus on Jakob did jolt me. For much of the second half I felt I had begun by reading one book and was now reading another. Since I had invested equally in the other protagonists (the fathers) I missed the one who almost entirely disappears from the story until the very end, and kept wishing throughout that the plot would remember to return to him.

Looking at the novel as a Bildungsroman, however, the portrayal of Jakob’s growth and painful maturation from boy to adult is keenly perceptive. The tenderness of innocence and the all-enveloping, all-changing experience of a first crush are shown in all their intensity, as is the offering of one’s heart only to discover cruelty that leads to anguished confusion and fear of persecution. A sensitive, daydreaming youth, Jakob has a practical side that allows him to clearly grasp the dangers and difficulties of his situation but also makes him honest with himself as he quietly refuses to deny or marginalise his feelings. Working at the local inn, he helps support his struggling family without complaint, but events open up his awareness of a larger world and excite him with the possibility of a more ambitious future. I longed for it for him, too, not always for unselfish reasons: for a longish section nothing much happens in the story except what goes on in Jakob’s head. During this time the author has him either daydreaming or interminably scrubbing and sweeping the floors at work. Since I was already missing the other characters, this is the one time I grew restless while reading the novel.

A note on the back cover (Cheyenne Publishing trade paperback, 2010) recommends The Glass Minstrel to readers aged sixteen and up. In keeping with the general tone of the book, in all but one instances any sensuality referred to is confined to excerpts from young Heinrich Schiffer's journal, and there it is sweetly hinted at rather than truly described. For this reason the one scene where Jakob’s fevered imaginings leads to a really very brief but by comparison unexpectedly explicit moment, struck a slightly jarring note for me.

The most complex character in the book is arguably the bereaved father of Heinrich, Andreas Schiffer. A wealthy man, he is the protagonist with the most to lose in terms of social standing and respect. Having groomed Heinrich to follow in his footsteps, Schiffer not only grieves the loss of a talented, favourite child but takes the youth’s homosexuality as a personal injury. This self-pitying agitation gradually fosters a paranoia that poisons his relationship with the rest of the family without him understanding why things are going wrong. His multiple flaws and the direct access the reader is allowed into his feelings and thought processes made him a highly interesting character to me: he was the least predictable of the protagonists. Unfortunately, when he finally has a light-bulb moment, the effect it has on him seemed embarrassingly contrived to me because the build-up simply was not there to shore up his transformation. In fact, as I was nearing the last pages I increasingly worried about how the author was possibly going to have time to wrap everything up. In Herr Schiffer’s case, I feel it was not altogether successfully achieved.

Finally, I perceived a gap of logic that pushed the externals of the story even deeper into the realm of a fairytale. Zirndorf is described as a very small town that is suffering from economic depression, and its isolation from centres such as Nuremberg and Munich is stressed. Yet every day Abelard Bauer’s toyshop is shown to be full of customers and business exceeds his wildest hopes; over and over again he and his assistant grow (happily) exhausted from the hectic pace. I did not really mind, though: with his unselfish grief, warmth, and regrets, the vividly portrayed Abelard Bauer is my favourite character in the novel, and I was glad to see his shelves empty so fast. What did disappoint me a little was that although he is a toymaker and creator of blown glass ornaments he is only shown selling his wares, not manufacturing them. Even the making of the glass minstrel is described with a technical vagueness that gives not the smallest insight into glassblowing and not even a visual introduction to Bauer’s workshop. Nor was any clear mention made of the novelty Christmas ornaments fashioned from glass blown into moulds represented in 1850. From what information I was able to collect, it appears the technique had been invented only three years earlier.

All in all, however, this was a lovely way to begin my holiday-themed reading. The sparkling positives in The Glass Minstrel far outshone any shortcomings for me. The author and genre are new to me, but one of my book-related Christmas wishes will be that a large publishing house quickly snatches up Hayden Thorne. This author’s style has mainstream appeal. While not perfect, The Glass Minstrel is nothing less than exquisite. I hope it gets into many stockings and peeks out from underneath countless trees this Christmas.

 

Excerpts can be found here and in a post on the author’s blog.