cyphomandra (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
cyphomandra) wrote2007-05-05 09:03 pm
cyphomandra) wrote2007-05-05 09:03 pm
Entry tags:
Books I didn't like
Library experiments.
The Valley of Secrets. Charmian Hussey.
Stephen Lansbury, an orphan of indeterminate age (old enough own property with no-one blinking twice, young enough to say “Wow!”, “Gosh!” and “Goodness!” in a contemporary setting without a trace of self-consciousness, inherits a mysterious estate from a hitherto unknown relative in Cornwall and spends ages exploring it and reading through the Amazonian travel diaries left by his great-uncle. Food is taken when he leaves it out, strange noises in the night, exotic tropical flowers etc etc, and eventually he finds an elderly Amazonian Indian looking after a bunch of smuggled rare rainforest animals (they're Bugwomps, Swampwomps and Tigerwomps, and I suspect them of being fictional).
Stephen is one of those cardboard characters who never really comes alive - he’s mildly dyslexic until the author wants him to read the diaries; he’s done a course in wildlife conservation but thinks nothing about the implications of putting a bunch of exotic animals into another ecosystem; he muses, observes and wanders without ever taking action, and the apparent final challenge he faces – the need for money for the estate to keep functioning – is solved without him, when Murra-yari (the Amazonian Indian) offers to sell a massive gold pendant (“my one and only possession of value”) before dying quietly off-stage. I agree with the author that the treatment of the Amazonian Indians by certain Western missionaries and corporations has been and continues to be atrocious. I’m just not sure that hauling people thousands of miles away from their home and never giving them the chance to go back – or, really, establish any sort of community over here – is a particularly good alternative.
Murra-yari also has a nifty cure for malaria, which Stephen is able to brew up for him when he collapses and, really, it’s all far too close to the noble savage for comfort. I would also note that it is very hard to pull off having your main character muse, “Why did life have to be so complicated! Why did it have to be so sad! Why couldn’t Man live in harmony, [with what?] and enjoy this wonderful planet in peace? Why did he have to use and abuse? Stephen suppposed that it all boiled down to greed.”
The thing I don’t blame the author for is the crass Americanisation of the text – you’re in Cornwall, native to England and eating a “crunchy, golden pastry-case... filled with a succulent mixture of meat, potato, onion” – you’re not going to call it a fucking pot pie, if you’ll excuse the emphasis.
Paula Christian. Amanda, The Other Side of Desire. Two in one. Reprint of lesbian pulp novels from the mid-60s that, according to the blurb, enable “two very different women [to] explore their sexuality and search for love on their own terms”.
In Amanda, Ev, a straight (apparently) writer of lesbian novels is contacted by a (married) aspiring writer of lesbian novels, who moves into her life, seduces her and dumps her for the next thing, being one of those heartless bisexuals you get so often in lesbian romances. Shattered, Ev ends up with a gay crowd; tries to sleep around and doesn’t like it; makes friends with a lesbian called Cynthia; and then realises, at the end, that the reason she’s never been in love with a man is because she’s been holding back. She turns down Cynthia’s pass with a lot of rather offensive psychoanalysis (“You’re not in love with me... you’re just lonely,” and starts writing a straight book, good enough to be published in hardcover.
The Other Side of Desire has a married housewife with a dark lesbian past falling in love with (yes, a heartless bisexual) Kim, also married but “wild” and experimental, and gets burned before realising that she needs to grow up, and that her husband is a saint for having affairs left, right and centre (she finds his little black book) rather than leave the marriage because he only gets sex with her once a month. (“His infidelity was nothing more than a courtesy to her...” because, obviously, she's the one who’s hung up on sex.)
I can see why these were liked in their time, because the sex is relatively explicit and there’s a lot of lurid references to the gay scene (along with a fairly hefty dislike of “bull dykes”) that at least suggest an alternative, but they’re nasty to read and ultimately dishonest. I suppose, on the bright side, that this is progress.
The Valley of Secrets. Charmian Hussey.
Stephen Lansbury, an orphan of indeterminate age (old enough own property with no-one blinking twice, young enough to say “Wow!”, “Gosh!” and “Goodness!” in a contemporary setting without a trace of self-consciousness, inherits a mysterious estate from a hitherto unknown relative in Cornwall and spends ages exploring it and reading through the Amazonian travel diaries left by his great-uncle. Food is taken when he leaves it out, strange noises in the night, exotic tropical flowers etc etc, and eventually he finds an elderly Amazonian Indian looking after a bunch of smuggled rare rainforest animals (they're Bugwomps, Swampwomps and Tigerwomps, and I suspect them of being fictional).
Stephen is one of those cardboard characters who never really comes alive - he’s mildly dyslexic until the author wants him to read the diaries; he’s done a course in wildlife conservation but thinks nothing about the implications of putting a bunch of exotic animals into another ecosystem; he muses, observes and wanders without ever taking action, and the apparent final challenge he faces – the need for money for the estate to keep functioning – is solved without him, when Murra-yari (the Amazonian Indian) offers to sell a massive gold pendant (“my one and only possession of value”) before dying quietly off-stage. I agree with the author that the treatment of the Amazonian Indians by certain Western missionaries and corporations has been and continues to be atrocious. I’m just not sure that hauling people thousands of miles away from their home and never giving them the chance to go back – or, really, establish any sort of community over here – is a particularly good alternative.
Murra-yari also has a nifty cure for malaria, which Stephen is able to brew up for him when he collapses and, really, it’s all far too close to the noble savage for comfort. I would also note that it is very hard to pull off having your main character muse, “Why did life have to be so complicated! Why did it have to be so sad! Why couldn’t Man live in harmony, [with what?] and enjoy this wonderful planet in peace? Why did he have to use and abuse? Stephen suppposed that it all boiled down to greed.”
The thing I don’t blame the author for is the crass Americanisation of the text – you’re in Cornwall, native to England and eating a “crunchy, golden pastry-case... filled with a succulent mixture of meat, potato, onion” – you’re not going to call it a fucking pot pie, if you’ll excuse the emphasis.
Paula Christian. Amanda, The Other Side of Desire. Two in one. Reprint of lesbian pulp novels from the mid-60s that, according to the blurb, enable “two very different women [to] explore their sexuality and search for love on their own terms”.
In Amanda, Ev, a straight (apparently) writer of lesbian novels is contacted by a (married) aspiring writer of lesbian novels, who moves into her life, seduces her and dumps her for the next thing, being one of those heartless bisexuals you get so often in lesbian romances. Shattered, Ev ends up with a gay crowd; tries to sleep around and doesn’t like it; makes friends with a lesbian called Cynthia; and then realises, at the end, that the reason she’s never been in love with a man is because she’s been holding back. She turns down Cynthia’s pass with a lot of rather offensive psychoanalysis (“You’re not in love with me... you’re just lonely,” and starts writing a straight book, good enough to be published in hardcover.
The Other Side of Desire has a married housewife with a dark lesbian past falling in love with (yes, a heartless bisexual) Kim, also married but “wild” and experimental, and gets burned before realising that she needs to grow up, and that her husband is a saint for having affairs left, right and centre (she finds his little black book) rather than leave the marriage because he only gets sex with her once a month. (“His infidelity was nothing more than a courtesy to her...” because, obviously, she's the one who’s hung up on sex.)
I can see why these were liked in their time, because the sex is relatively explicit and there’s a lot of lurid references to the gay scene (along with a fairly hefty dislike of “bull dykes”) that at least suggest an alternative, but they’re nasty to read and ultimately dishonest. I suppose, on the bright side, that this is progress.
no subject
...and then I read summaries of them, and I cringe.
Wow! I wonder if the 'bull dykes' come off similarly in the texts as gorillas do in Burroughs's Tarzan stuff?
Ew. Ew ew ew.
no subject
no subject
And yeah, not so much in the mood for tolerating self-hatred these days. Maybe later. I watch enough bad lesbian movies where somebody regularly gets offed through vehicular manslaughter - I don't need prose sources for this bullshit, too.