Wrapping up REAMDE

Apparently the reason it took me three years to review REAMDE was that I needed time to entirely forget that I’d read Abigail Nussbaum’s excellent review:

What Stephenson is doing is trying to depict competence as a function of character. When really it’s almost always a situational trait–a person may be extraordinarily competent in one setting and helpless in another, may have a firm grasp of their situation in one instance, and a completely unrealistic confidence in their abilities in another. Reamde, which valorizes confidence and the general competence that has been a hallmark of, yes, masculinity, in all of Stephenson’s novels, doesn’t quite know what to do when that confidence turns out to have been unfounded. In Peter’s case, its response is to decide that he must not have been terribly masculine–which is to say, competent, intelligent, possessed of a firm grip on reality–to begin with. But in Richard’s case, Stephenson’s approach is to double down, to continue to insist that Richard is, as Zula thinks of him, the epitome of masculinity, even as he piles on the evidence to the contrary.

Most of the reviews I’ve read of Reamde have found Richard charming or heroic, but to my mind he is one of Stephenson’s most aggravating creations, if only because it’s not at all clear whether we’re meant to be aggravated by him. Richard is a perpetual fish out of water–a black sheep among his staid, law-abiding, Midwestern family, but too steeped in their values to fit in among West Coast liberals or his fellow board members. In another man, this perennial ambivalence might have led to humility, a willingness to see the other guy’s point of view. Richard uses it as a justification for feeling superior to everyone around him–to his Red State relations and his Blue State colleagues, to the fuddy-duddy Donald and the trailer trash Devin, to the Forces of Brightness and the Earthtone Coalition, to his young, gadget- and Facebook-obsessed cousins and his old, computer-illiterate ones. It is “a belief that had been inculcated in him from the get-go,” we are told, “that there was an objective reality, which all people worth talking to could observe and understand, and that there was no point in arguing about anything that could be so observed and so understood.” But for Richard, that objective reality seems to mean whatever he thinks about the world…

REAMDE: a re-plot

Now I’m trying to work out what a plot for REAMDE would be that would preserve the existing (interesting) characters reasonably intact as far as personality and backstory goes, but make more use of the virtual world.

Hrm.

The opening of the novel remains much the same: Richard recruits the recently graduated Zula to work in the geology department of Corporation 9592 reporting to Pluto. Zula and Peter go to Richard’s Schloss for a weekend, during which Peter delivers stolen credit card numbers to Wallace.

But in this version, the credit card numbers are a sideshow, because Wallace puts a bit more together in his background research on Peter, specifically, what Zula’s job could mean for him and his employers.

Because this time, Wallace, Csongor and others in Ivanov’s employ have a bit more going on in the virtual world of T’Rain, specifically, their own scams/viruses/extortion rackets. Richard is in deep trouble in this variant; he and Nolan Xu say, loudly and often, that they designed T’Rain to be gold farmer friendly, but an alternative interpretations. is that they designed it to be organised crime friendly, or perhaps even terrorist friendly. Judging from the Snowden leaks, the FBI, CIA and NSA believe it to be both and more, and it’s not clear how compromised the systems are. Surveillance of virtual worlds is not an amusing footnote to the Snowden revelations in this world.

[I haven’t quite worked out when REAMDE is set, but there’s a pretty narrow range of options. It’s after Michael Jackson’s death in 2009, because that is mentioned, and some time before its release in 2011. Probably 2010. I’m moving it to late 2013 or 2014 because incorporating the Snowden leaks is amusing.]

So T’Rain is a place where there’s money to be made before the governments shut it down, and Zula Forthrast is the niece of the founder, and works in the department that decides where the gold is buried. The Scottish financier Wallace (who in the original novel is the only person involved with Ivanov who plays T’Rain, and who is well worth keeping alive in this version) is heading up Ivanov’s T’Rain related moneymaking schemes. The Russian criminals can’t believe their luck in getting so close to Zula, and double down on Peter using the standard “oh, you thought you made a one off deal with organised crime? Ahahahaha, no” blackmail technique in order to use him as a tool to get closer to her. (Presumably Zula and Peter don’t break up, or at least not as soon, in this model.) Their aim: to leverage inside knowledge of existing virtual gold deposits within T’Rain, or perhaps even to add gold deposits. They have contacts in China who can turn this into cold hard fiat money…

Meanwhile, in China: Olivia Halifax-Lin is still a spy for MI6, but she’s spying on Corporation 9592 and its various badly or well-disguised criminal and terrorist clients, having obtained employment for 9592’s Chinese arm under her false native Chinese identity.

Olivia has recently struck an unexpected jackpot: the ruthless and feared terrorist financier, the Welshman Abdallah Jones, long since having grown out of his blowing-things-up days and grown into the brains behind any number of financial schemes funneling tens of millions of dollars into jihadist terrorist causes, appears to be doing business in T’Rain, and may perhaps even be based in Xiamen presently in order to supervise things personally. This may coincide with the sudden change in activities of the well known Chinese gold farming and virus writing gang, the da G shou, under the leadership of a young man alias “Marlon”, who contract out their extortion services to the highest bidder. But if they’re doing business with Abdallah Jones, they are in way over their heads… and as hard as it is to feel sorry for Russian crooks, probably that mob that the da G shou used to work for ought to watch their backs too. And Richard Forthrast really could stand to beef up his personal security.

Something like that. It would need way more detail to work out how to get Seamus and Yuxia to show up, where Sokolov’s loyalties lie (although at least this would bring him and Jones into fairly direct conflict), and such, and I very doubt I will spend the time, but if anyone has suggestions, go ahead.

Otherwise, there you go. Put a money laundering scheme in the centre of your novel, you may as well use it to launder money.

REAMDE: what is up with that anyway?

I find Neal Stephenson’s novels interesting in that they’re stickier than my opinion of them would suggest. Would I tell you I liked REAMDE? Not really. Would I suggest you read it? Only warily and with a number of caveats. How many times have I read it? Probably five or six times (although as is usual with fiction, I re-read favourite scenes or at random, not cover-to-cover).

In addition, I really want to puzzle out what the hell is up with it, structurally.

Contra the acknowledgments, which suggest that this is a carefully researched and plotted novel, the way it reads is this:

Neal Stephenson sits down at his desk. He starts writing, pointing himself at a plot which revolves around gold-farming and culture clashes related to it, particularly US v China, young v old and different kinds of fandom and gaming (Tolkien-like immersive world-building versus metaphor-collapsing gold farmers). In the virtual world, these collapse into the War of Realignment in T’Rain between the Earthtone Coalition and the Forces of Brightness.

But there’s wobbles. Russian crime figures with no very large interest in computer gaming and no clear place in the WoR dichotomies have written themselves in: they’ve shown up, murdered someone and kidnapped several others and mostly want to solve the REAMDE problem in meat space with real guns, and look distressingly like they might do so without much concern for thematic issues. But perhaps they can be folded into the storyline? Let’s just see how this plays out.

OK, we’re in the basement of the apartment building in China with a couple of kidnapped Americans, a Hungarian hacker, ex-Spetsnaz security goons and a senior organised crime figure. The Russians have guns, and intent, and the Chinese gold farmers have a flimsy Internet connection and not the slightest hint that anyone is coming for them. This isn’t good. Perhaps we can distract them! OK, let’s see. They break down the door of the wrong apartment, and perhaps what they find there stops them in their tracks and we can get back to our real-world/virtual-world balance? So they open the door and they find…

Abdallah Jones.

And at this point, the novel is just done for, because now Jones is running the show. He’s an exceptionally competent, effective and frankly frightening character, not least for any writer trying to keep a lid on their plot. He gets out of the apartment with a hostage who was previously one of the novel’s central characters, turns her instantly into a pawn, walks into the street, hijacks a taxi at gun point, and at that point the novel is just done for. He’s just flat out walked away from the novel’s most effective close up fighter, Sokolov, and never really gets within range again; Sokolov is reduced to one impotent if satisfying phone threat later on. He never gets on the Internet, so Csongor can’t touch him on the Internet and Marlon can’t best him in T’Rain. Among the heroes, only the Forthrasts, Zula and Richard, interact with him from then on, and he’s taken great care to disempower them first. (Both of them believe they have a psychological insight into him at various points, neither of them manage to do more with it than convince him to let them live.)

From then on, it’s all about Jones. We just just barely keep enough of a lid on Jones that he only manages to fly into Canada rather than the United States itself, and even there he assembles a terrorist cell, kills a number of people personally, arms himself, and blows up a border checkpoint more or less unhindered. Only his obsession with personally creating havoc in the US keeps him still enough to be stopped. (Seamus wonders if he’s a coward who doesn’t want to die. I don’t think this is true, I think he’s an egotist who wants to die the biggest and most colourful death. Hence Vegas.)

T’Rain? T’Rain is just a bank account for Marlon and a way for Richard to find out three week old information about Zula’s whereabouts, and the entire War of Realignment and all its colourful cardboard cutout characters just a way to give Marlon enough money to lease a business jet.

And honestly, Seamus could have left Csongor, Marlon and Yuxia behind in the Phillipines without much impact on any plot point other than the very hastily filled in romances, and Seamus can enter the United States through the CIA’s normal channels (probably commercial passenger flights, he’s a US citizen using his real name) so the entire business jet thing is thoroughly beside the point.

Which is only one of the very very many gaping holes left in the novel by the sudden re-orientation around the very real-world Global War on Jones. The precise details of to what extent Devin Skraelin deliberately incited the War of Realignment thus backstabbing Richard and Donald Cameron both to the tune of (potentially) hundreds of millions of dollars? Totally unimportant. The hints that REAMDE is based on a virus originating in the Philippines and that its creators have connections there? Dropped on the ground. Richard’s entire second past criminal career testing out international money laundering channels in and out of China as research for the eventual development of T’Rain’s currency system? Blink and you’ll miss it, it certainly has no repercussions, although it might have been very useful background in a novel that was actually about gold farming.

Jones’s appearance is not all bad news. It necessitates equivalent firepower (metaphorically, I mean, although also literally) on the other side, in the form of MI6 and the CIA, in the form of Olivia and Seamus, both of whom are interesting, fun, characters. For that matter, Richard Forthrast’s personality is much more satisfying when he’s in the wilderness in possession of only his clothes and his wit, using his knowledge and cynicism in the service of saving Zula’s life and poking gentle and very risky fun at the thoroughly deserving Jones than when he’s sitting on a personal fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars while also hypocritically despairing at the woolly liberal thinking of cosseted US manbabies (from whom he differs in essentially no meaningful way except that he’s a generation older and once killed a bear).

But it doesn’t put a lot of these characters to best use. I have a technical quibble with Olivia’s ability to pass for having grown up in China as the plot requires: namely, being raised bilingual does mean she would have native-level fluency in Mandarin, but accents work differently. If she lived almost entirely in Wales as a child as she seems to have done, I am almost certain she would speak Mandarin with what fellow fluent speakers would know was British or at least foreign accent. (I’d guess that people outside the UK would not recognise it as specifically Welsh, but she also wouldn’t sound like she grew up in Beijing.) China certainly isn’t unified in accents, but if her cover story has her with a specific provincial origin to try and cover her accent, or she’s had extensive accent coaching, it isn’t mentioned.

Ahem. In any case, quibble aside, Olivia is a pretty interesting character, but her structural role is essentially that of being an information conduit for stopping Richard Forthrast going to China fruitlessly, and getting Sokolov out of China, back to the US and giving him the information and connections required to be anywhere near where Jones is. There’s actual explicit mention of her being trained for some other plot albeit an exceptionally boring one, but let’s call this the closest thing that the novel does to breaking the fourth wall. She’s in the wrong novel. If MI6 had some plausible interest in money laundering (and why not, in the service of terrorism it would be within its remit) she would have been an interesting character from the antagonist side. (I don’t think I’m going out on a limb to guess that in a Stephenson novel that was actually about currencies, like Cryptonomicon was, the forces of empire and fiat money would be on the wrong side.)

Likewise, Seamus comes with a fusion of the virtual and real world skill that would be useful in the T’Rain novel that this isn’t; he’s the only character who is an accomplished real world warrior (like Sokolov) and T’Rain player too (he seems second only to Marlon in terms of skill, I don’t count Richard because Egdod is not exactly powered by player skill alone).

I am not honestly clear what the hell is up with the Russian plotline even in this Jones-took-over-the-novel-by-force model. The novel seems keen to rehabilitate Sokolov, which I am not at all sold on. On my initial read through I was fairly sure he’d personally killed Wallace, and even if he instead was more Ivanov’s personal bodyguard (which might make sense, Wallace was a known quantity and easily dealt with in physical terms) he was highly complicit in Wallace’s murder and in Zula and Peter’s kidnapping, and he seems to be, at most, only slightly regretful of either. But there’s nothing in the novel that portrays these as minor moral failings even using the novel’s own frame of reference. Murder and kidnapping are plenty reprehensible when Abdallah Jones does them. But Sokolov gets past them by harbouring respect for Zula or something? Weird. I actually like Sokolov a lot myself, but only when I ignore the first sixth or so of the novel, which the novel itself shouldn’t have the option of doing. And what structural use he would have had in a gold-farming novel is unclear. He knows a bit of computer security, but not as much as Csongor, and he doesn’t game at all. Wallace himself, as a financial expert, might have been better.

Likewise, I’m not clear on why Peter is so loathsome from the novel’s point of view. No individual action of his is unusual in the novel’s context. He steals credit cards, but organised computer crime is Marlon’s livelihood and structurally enabling it is one of Richard’s. Csongor seems to have done pretty much identical things to Peter. He’s an autodidact but that ought to be a plus. I think there’s some political point about the particular loathsomeness of young US men other than veterans that I’m not buying here, probably because the book isn’t selling it nearly well enough. (Likewise, the repeated stabs at people who aren’t into killing bears and cougars, or who believe them to be not dangerous, which have no structural use since there’s no in universe character or power arguing against their danger or against killing them. Stephenson can make his points about conservation and/or lily-livered pampered US Millennial manbabies in non-fiction in future thanks, and I will give them a miss.)

And the novel is a criminal waste of Zula, the refugee-scientist. She is very resourceful and brings her intelligence, bravery and survival skills to bear every moment she can, but her opponents are too formidable. She has a core of decency, completely unused mathematical and computing skills and decent psychological insight. They have guns, death wishes, misogyny and jail-building abilities, with predictable results: they win almost all the time. Damsels in distress aren’t a lot more fun when they’re highly resilient damsels who can thoroughly document the borders of their distress. What a waste of a great character. And her great escape is in the service of saving Richard, on whom I won’t even spend a paragraph. I don’t loathe him, but he’s Randy Waterhouse all grown up, the clear-minded objective (white US male) observer/businessman/Stephenson stand-in.

Anyway, in the form that it has, the novel has Abdallah Jones, a verily awesome villain, versus a bunch of people who mostly aren’t really worthy protagonists, because they’re in the wrong novel with the wrong opponent. And Jones thus ends up surviving the combined efforts of Sokolov and Seamus only to be shot by Richard, and only because Jones happens to be shooting at a cougar at the time. Very unfortunate. They should have all been in two or three different novels which didn’t conclude with a few hundred pages of, firstly, a bunch of people all independently re-reaching exactly the same conclusions as the previous group of imperfectly informed characters eventually did, and secondly a number of small groups of people with guns stalking each other in a very difficult to follow slow moving action sequence.

And don’t even get me started on the romances. Firstly, why are there romances? I don’t buy Csongor/Zula for a second. His attraction to her, sure, whatever, she sounds plenty attractive. Her attraction to him? Why? Her psychological bond in captivity is with Sokolov (and later, far more ambiguously with Jones, mostly because he’s charismatic and funny while also being evil), and while I don’t favour some horrid Stockholm-ish Sokolov/Zula romance and Jones/Zula would have stopped me reading, it seems better for her to escape the whole thing and go and get some somewhere else than to circle back to Csongor. And Yuxia is again an interesting (if structurally unimportant) character, but her pairing with Seamus seems based on the idea that every woman who appears in more than one scene of the novel must end up with some white guy by the end of it (none of the women are white, note), and he’s just the only one she gets to meet aside from the one who has already fallen in love with Zula. Here’s your official white dude, Yuxia. Too bad he lives on the other side of the world from the family you are so close to and miss so much.

Finally, Sokolov/Olivia at least makes some sense in terms of predilections on the woman’s side, specifically, that Olivia has a thing for special forces types. And there’s no horrible power imbalance; she and Sokolov both do each other significant favours. I think she has better chemistry with Seamus, though, and it’s not clear why she doesn’t get to try both and, if necessary, choose. It is OK for the person with the most on-screen sexual partners in a novel to be a woman. It is OK!

In conclusion: why do I keep re-reading this? I think I do want at least two novels related to this to exist: one which really is about gold-farming and culture clashes, and a completely different one with Abdallah Jones as the villain.

Romance again: the truth about Charles de Lacey

This is an entry I wrote well over a year ago but never posted, about Caroline Linden’s regency romance The Way to A Duke’s Heart. It is the final novel in a trilogy, The Truth About the Duke, in which the three sons of the very recently deceased Francis de Lacey, Duke of Durham, try and prove their legitimacy while at the same time finding unexpected true love.

In this third book, the hero is Charles de Lacey, the probable new duke and the least promising hero; the drinker and womaniser to his younger brothers Edward the coolheaded and effective businessman and Gerard the hotheaded but effective soldier.

But the real puzzle is what the hell was up with their father?!

The story from the point of view of Francis de Lacey goes something like this. As young man with some inherited wealth, the grandson of the estranged brother of the Duke of Durham, he goes to London in search of fun and discovers it in the form of one Dorothy Cope, a young actress. Annoyed at her open skepticism as regards his interest in her, he bullies her into marrying him. Ill-suited, they soon part ways, encountering each other a year later on distant friendly terms and then never again. Fault the first: terrible boyfriend.

In his early middle-age, his father’s cousins — the two sons of the elderly Duke of Durham — each die without an heir; the second only some months before the duke’s own death. Francis is thus very unexpectedly a duke. He and his much younger sister Margaret move to London at the beginning of the Season to establish his household. He (for reasons unknown to his sister until about forty years later) swears off marriage but settles the largest dowry of the Season on her, and she thus goes on the marriage market at age thirty, with unfashionable manners and as a figure of both desire to fortune hunters and fun to more or less everyone else. This brilliant decision on the part of Francis to throw his sister to the wolves of London results in the novella I Love the Earl, in which her recently-acquired and entirely understandable open hostility to men who wish to marry her fascinates the impoverished Earl of Dowling, they quickly fall in love, and Francis yanks her dowry out from under her since apparently (earlier appearances to the contrary) he doesn’t want her to marry a fortune hunter. This leaves them to live in an unheated cottage in Wales farming sheep for the first year of their marriage, at which point Francis decides he believes in true love after all, relents and makes Dowling’s fortune.

For reasons that are never made clear, Margaret actually forgives Francis this immense insult to her judgement and that of her husband, which means he thinks it might be a good idea to do it again to his eldest son, for which he pays a higher price.

In the meantime, he does marry again, to someone who sounds much too good for him (from the reminsnences of her adult sons), his duchess Anne. He privately tries to resolve the question of potential bigamy with regards to his undissolved marriage to Dorothy but otherwise rules over a reasonably happy household for perhaps twelve or thirteen years until Anne’s death in her fourth labour, in which she and her premature daughter both die, leaving sons aged eleven, nine and five to their father’s tender mercies.

Francis, now left to his own parenting devices, starts as he means to go on, playing his sons off against each other. He goads Charlie with his younger brothers’s superior skills, while reserving his most powerful affection for his heir. (Charlie remembers keenly his father’s boasts about his brothers, his brothers remember keenly how his father called only for Charlie as he died, and paid Charlie’s ludicrous gambling and jewelry expenses.)

As a young man, Charlie falls in love with a sixteen year old girl, Maria, who Francis believes is being thrown into his son’s path by fortune hunting parents. He tells Maria and her family that he will withdraw all financial support from Charlie during his life if Charlie marries Maria. But Maria is not a middle-aged well-connected and socially independent bachelor like the Earl of Dowling, she’s sixteen and she and her family withdraw from the match.

Linden also starts as she means to go on here: she’s pretty unsympathetic to Maria throughout even though she starts in a terrible position — aged sixteen, caught between her family’s manipulation, the fear of (relative) poverty, and her genuine although not all-consuming like for Charlie — and ends in a far worse one. After refusing to elope with Charlie, she’s married off within weeks (still sixteen) to the Earl of Worley, who values her only for her looks and her ability to bear him a son. She eventually uses the one ace she thinks she has up her sleeve — a later affair with Charlie which ends in her firstborn son, Worley’s heir, being of uncertain parentage — to try and manipulate Worley and ends up trapped with him despising her more but refusing to cast her off, leaving her and her son at risk of Worley murdering them with Charlie only able to offer his brother Edward’s possible protection, and then only if she can get herself and her son out of Worley’s house to seek it. I like Charlie the best of the three brothers but only if I skip those chapters and/or imagine that weeks after all this is made plain and the novels conclude, Worley catches a terrible cold and dies, leaving Maria managing the estates on behalf of her toddler son, and becoming famed for her uncanny skill investing her dowry on behalf of herself and her four daughters, unmatched even by the unearthly head for business of Teresa, Duchess of Durham, Charlie’s eventual wife. Because she needs business skill much more than than the gifted Tessa does.

Anyway, Francis. He has a self-congratulatory “you’ll thank me someday” sit-down with Charlie after Maria refuses to elope with him and Charlie does not in fact, thank him someday, at least, not while he lives. He rides for London the next morning and his correspondence with his father from then on comes in the form of jewelers’ bills for presents to his various mistresses. Charlie does not come to Francis’s death bed, nor to his funeral, next darkening the door of the family homes for his brother Edward’s wedding. He does remain close to Margaret, although it seems she never reveals what an arse Francis was to her, and in touch with his brothers although more at their expense than his.

So now Francis has managed to misread and grievously insult the Earl of Dowling’s love for his sister and has estranged his heir and influenced him only in the direction of being a noted source of income for women who want to get some jewels in return for sex with (apparently) the single best-looking man in England. (For the first two novels, which concern the other two brothers, Linden is carefully only to allow Charlie to appear on screen in the company of men, or of women who are married, ideally recently and lustfully to one of his own brothers, or who are much older, and even then his status as Sex Incarnate is dwelt on in some detail.) A good deed to the women of London, perhaps, but otherwise Francis is not doing well in matters of the heart.

So does he retreat from the field? Of course not. He arranges a match for Edward which is eminently suitable to all appearances; after his death Edward — spurned by his fiancee at the first hint of financial trouble — finds that his father’s alert nose for a fortune hunter failed him, very publicly, when his ex-fiancee’s family sells the story of Francis’s bigamy to the newspapers.

To top it all off, Francis spends the last year of his life being blackmailed over his secret first marriage, revealing nothing to his sons and discovering nothing of either the blackmailer or of Dorothy’s fate, and dies knowing that Charlie, who isn’t even well-prepared to be the Duke of Durham other than having tastes for spending the estate’s money, may instead end up disinherited (as an illegitmate son of a bigamous marriage). He spends his dying hours crying in vain for Charlie to come to him and receive his confession and forgive him. All this accomplishes is hurting the two sons who made it to his deathbed, Edward and Gerard, for whom he has barely a thought. Entirely by accident the ensuing scandal throws Edward and Gerard in the way of women with whom they are well-matched and smokingly sexually compatible (that’s the first two novels, One Night in London and Blame It On Bath). Only in death, Francis, are you good at marrying anyone off.

Francis retires from life with the following score: knowing jerk to his first wife, knowing jerk to his sister and her husband, acceptable to his second wife, knowing jerk to his eldest son, unknowing jerk to his second son. Thanks for playing Francis, next please!

At the end of The Way to a Duke’s Heart novel there’s some heavy-handed bits about Margaret and Charlie forgiving Francis everything at long last and I have no idea why. And in Linden’s FAQ, it sounds like some of her readers end up quite liking Francis. I got nothing.

You’ve probably come out of that summary not being a big fan of Charlie either, and on paper he’s terrible indeed. He’s definitely not the equal of his structural twin Anthony Hamilton of Linden’s Reece family novels (A Rake’s Guide to Seduction), who, thrown off by his own father (in circumstances rather like the Earl of Worley’s son, ie his father believes him to be a cuckoo), makes his own fortune and tries to live life by his own lights. And the thing with Lady Worley is bad: Lord Worley is the villain of that piece but Charlie is not the hero.

I suppose I like Charlie for two reasons: one is that he’s basically a nice person. This isn’t due to any extraordinary effort on his part: he’s a wealthy heir to a duke, and I’ve previously mentioned that he’s astonishingly good-looking. He simply hasn’t had any need to learn to be terribly manipulative beyond smiling at people and buying them drinks. He gets what he wants anyway. (And what he wants is generally mutual, also. His taste in pleasures seem to be fairly simple and consensual.*)

The other is that Charlie’s pretty wary of men (not without reason) and has cultivated a near-impermeable attitude of utter amused indifference in their company. Since this is nearly all one sees of him in the novels about his brothers, one gets to be surprised that he actually has a pretty readily available nice side, just only seen by women. (Tessa does not meet him in the company of his male peers, which is lucky for their match, as it would confirm all her worst fears about him and she’d run for the hills. So only the reader has this view.) He likes women as people, which always predisposes me to like male characters. Linden doesn’t dwell on this trait of his in general (unlike, eg, Susanna Clarke on Jonathan Strange also having this trait, which is one of the things I like about him too). It’s interesting how rare this is a noticable trait even in romantic heroes, they don’t generally derive pleasure from the company of women as well as that of the heroine in particular. See also Charlie’s brothers: they don’t despise women, they just don’t seem to have a lot of time for or interest in them in general.

So there you go, I’m a cheap date, really. Is hot, is not awful in all circumstances, likes women socially. Tessa is also fun. Situationally she’s not as badly off as Maria: she narrowly avoided a very bad marriage and has lived with her viscount brother managing his business affairs and coming as close to having men’s manners as her family will let her get away with (not very close). She appeals to Charlie mostly by being (beautiful and) somewhat wary of him. He is most unaccustomed to women finding his pleasant not-evil offers of sex on a plate rather frightening, but he rolls with it readily enough and doesn’t push her. Hot, is not awful in all circumstances, likes women socially, willing to do about a week’s work to seduce someone who doesn’t get the best first impression of him. Cheap date, I told you.

Linden also manages to walk a reasonably fine line between making Charlie rather careless and making him irritiatingly stupid. He’s not stupid, or aggressively lazy (crucially, as long as other men aren’t judging him, then he is). He’s just not sure who to be, if he can’t be junior Francis de Lacey. You have to do a bunch of reading between the lines to get my reading I think, but actually Charlie and Tessa both badly need a refuge from the unforgiving world of men and for different reasons neither begins to find it until they find each other. And then it’s a match that brings out the best in them both, which is nothing but luck, but still, I can get behind that.

In the end, this is my favourite of the three novels. I find Edward too uptight and Gerard too hotheaded, and I have a soft spot for men who like women. Charlie seems like a lot of fun, and I like the socially awkward headstrong Tessa a great deal. I think the whole trilogy is reasonably good and ends with the strongest novel. But none of the men are the equal of the effective and caring Anthony Hamilton of A Rake’s Guide to Seduction.

* Charlie de Lacey and Anthony Hamilton both have a problem in my reading, which is that having a large number of women lovers in the Regency period isn’t really a morally neutral act: their lovers are taking a big risk for them. Anthony is pretty lucky there, having fathered no children, Charlie isn’t.

Rake

Some rather disorganised notes on Rake, the original Australian series (I haven’t seen the US version), since it’s managed to get me to watch it through 22 episodes now (2 to go), which is almost unheard of for me and TV.

First a warning: it’s used trans women, including slurs, as a passing joke, and a crossdressing man and woman (I think? the script didn’t make a definitely statement either way) as an on-screen joke. It’s been called out elsewhere for using prison rape for jokes too. Which makes it unwatchable for some of my readers. (Not far off at times for me. Knock it off, media.)

Here’s the pretext, which will also help you decide if you give a toss: it centers around a grandiose, self-absorbed individual (Cleaver Greene) whose narcissism is justified. Not metaphysically, but merely insofar as the world really does revolve around him, as if by coincidence. All his ex-lovers are still to some degree emotionally tied to him. When his friends, frenemies and rivals can’t sleep with him, they all sleep with each other and tell him about it. Opposing counsel all hate him, personally.

And that works about as well as it would on any mere mortal, let alone a mere mortal who, however acerbic and clever, mostly wants a lot of women to like him as often as possible.

As an example, one of Cleaver’s antagonists, David Potter (Harry-sorry-David Potter, Matt Day made up to look like Daniel Radcliffe as Harry) is originally introduced as counsel representing the Australian Tax Office, suing Cleaver over tax fraud. But within a few episodes, Harry-sorry-David is both universally known by that nickname, which Cleaver gave him, and he’s unknowingly fallen in love with retired sex worker Melissa, one of Cleaver’s many one-true-loves. Later, in season 2, a very politically significant figure in multiple countries is killed not by assassination, but in an act of revenge related to one of Cleaver’s exes.

I saw a critique of this dynamic in the US version (“there’s only ten people living in Los Angeles and they all know each other??”) but it really works for Sydney, whose population of barristers is mostly fed by two universities, and whose law students mostly enter as 18 year olds and so many have known each other their entire adult lives. And that’s when they don’t know each other from high school.

And it’s written in the language of Sydney visually. Cleaver lives in Kings Cross, ever renewing red light district, because of course he does. David lives in Lilyfield, later-gentrifying working-class suburb, because of course he does. Everyone went to Sydney Uni, because of course they did. Everyone’s kids were delivered by the same obstetrician, because of course they were. (In reality, this one, apparently. In Rake, Sam Neill.)

The first season was very case of the week, with Cleaver serving as barrister to all the most lurid crooks. But one of the reasons I’ve kept watching is that it hasn’t shied away from this question of what happens when the world really does revolve around your cynical and often weak-willed self, including moving well away from its formula. Cleaver’s moderately lucrative career as barrister to all of the most newsworthy criminals is not immune to this misfortune. His life is (because it’s comedy), and his relationships don’t suffer permanently (because that’s the conceit, no one can quit Cleaver), but his career is game. The show works for me because at least some of Cleaver’s perils are real.

It also works because the acting is really fabulous. Richard Roxburgh has called in all the favours, from all the everyone. (There are only 10 actors in Australia, and they all know each other.) Particular nods to Roxburgh as Cleaver, Danielle Cormack as Scarlet Engels (Cleaver’s university-era love-of-his-life, now married to his best mate who is also his usual instructing solicitor), Caroline Brazier as Wendy (Cleaver’s ex-wife and mother of his son, who still acts as his therapist). And a few of the one-note characters (Robyn Malcolm as Kirsty Corella, Steve Le Marquand as Col) and many of the guest stars (Hugo Weaving as the cannibal economist, Sam Neill as the bestiality-practicing obstetrician, Rachel Griffiths as the rabal-rousing talk show host, Cate Blanchett as the on-screen version of Cleaver, Martin Henderson as Julian-Assange-by-another-name*)

Which brings me to season 3:

Spoilers for Season 3

The prison episode was compelling because of the degree to which they messed with the formula. Consider: it has a cold open. It has a first person narration. The narration is from beyond the grave. What in Rake‘s metaphysics or custom has prepared us for this? Nothing.

It also nicely continued the theme of there only being 10 people in Sydney. Apparently this extends to criminals, and, since high ranking justices are being jailed one by one for corruption, about 5 of them are the same people.

And finally, they messed with everyone revolving around Cleaver! In jail, it turns out, everything revolves around… Kirsty.

This ends up being part of what doesn’t work about this episode, actually. Kirsty’s various lovers have worked up until now, in various tropey sorts of ways. She’s Mick’s wife. Mick kills Nigel because he is a Scary Crime Boss and that’s what a Scary Crime Boss does when someone is interested his wife (other than for swinging, which is totally legit, because this is Rake and something has to not fit the trope). Kirsty is interested in Cleaver because she has power over him, and she is a Fully Self-Actualised Lady of Crime once Mick’s in jail. (I think she’s the only woman in the series to sleep with Cleaver without feeling any of the orbital pull of Cleaver, although Emily-the-homicidal-schoolgirl and Polly Nesbitt both use mostly him to further their own ends also.) Col is in love with in Kirsty because of another trope, The Loyal Sidekick of the Bad Husband who is Actually The One For Her. (Their thuggy love, so cute.)

So far so tropey. Then things get weird because it turns out that Mick has a Scary Evil older brother, long since jailed, who is also obsessed with Kirsty. To be honest, I think this is a production problem. I think the episode was written to feature Mick as the villain, and Richard Carter wasn’t available for it, so they had to write in a brother and make him bad enough to have killed Mick. Either that, or they couldn’t figure out how to have Cleaver, who’d slept with Kirsty, survive the anger of a man who’d already had someone dismembered for having a mere flirtation with her, and this is how they wrote around it.

Honestly, I think Cleaver could get into plenty enough trouble in jail without the centre of the series spinning off to have everything briefly orbit Kirsty. (However much I’d like to see this series with, say, Deborah Mailman playing the charismatic fallible centre of the universe, it is written with a man at the centre and I think it’s stuck with it.)

And the rest of the season is, I think, trying to do too much, although it’s very funny. Let’s see.

There’s Barney’s manpain. Actually if there’s one thing I wouldn’t miss from this series, it’s the Barney of S2 and S3. Cleaver’s eyerolling sidekick? Sure, great, have that trope, you probably need it. Barney with cancer trying to work out What It All Means? Go take a hike.

Actually, the other thing I wouldn’t miss is the writing of Scarlet. If the series needs a neurotic woman, and I’d argue it doesn’t, but if it does, does she have to be the Woman Whose Obvious Continual Dysfunction Makes Her Continued High-Powered Job A Mystery? We can infer that she must be a good barrister (she’s a silk in S3) etc, but all we see are tantrums and political flubs. Really not a fan. I love the acting, but this is the worst written character. (And it’s competing with beautiful-vulnerable-ex-sex-worker-with-a-heart-of-gold, which is no mean feat. Actually, if I ignore the awful tropey-ness of Melissa, I think that character is well written.)

There’s the attempt to squeeze all of NSW and Australian politics into the season. One episode got drugs in sport, clerical sexual abuse and the corruption of the Labor Party? Yikes. In S1, a cannibal got his own damn episode.

There’s the mystery. Who made $120 million of trades (in the name of a character I think we’re meant to care about without any screentime) and why? Presumably it’s related to the what was in the email that Paulie accidentally hit Reply-All on mystery. This has had all of about 7 minutes on-screen.

There’s the attempt to skewer both James Packer and Gina Rinehart in the person of Tikki Wenton (“second richest woman in Australia” has been repeated about six times, maybe so Rinehart — richest woman, in fact, richest person, in Australia — can’t sue the producers over this depiction?)

There’s the career triumphs of Cal McGregor, who is an amazing Slimy Shameless Antagonist (kudos Damien Garvey!) which are again mostly offscreen. We assume his TV show is top of the pops, I guess? It’s not shown. This was done a lot better in S2, where McGregor had to interact with other politicians onscreen in order to be portrayed as The Politician to End All Politicking. (For that matter, David Potter ins S3 as state opposition leader seems to have a life without colleagues or an actual job, but at least they lampshade this.)

But that said, I think I’m much happier with S3 than I would be if it was the third season of bizarre crime of the week plus Cleaver has sex with someone. Rake‘s attraction to me is that Cleaver has to pay some of the price (a comedic rather than tragic price) for being centre of the universe.

Perhaps its ambitions this swasin, both achieved and not, are due to Roxburgh, who apparently wants S3 to be its conclusion, and has been co-showrunning S3 as well as starring.

* I am no fan of Assange, but in this universe, a character with that level of fame and self-absorption really works as a foil, and I wish “Joshua Floyd” had stuck around.

BPAL frimps: Ameles Potamos and Medea

Ameles Potamos

The River of Unmindfulness: bittersweet black water swollen with forgotten tears.

In the imp: musk, musk, musk and… musk. (Or what I call “musk”.) The oil is a really rich golden colour. I may never be able to dissociate the two again.

Second sniff: hrm yeah, OK, also a touch of deep water. I’m quite liking this in the imp.

Wet: musk and then it smells “like perfume” on me so far. My partner is going to hate this.

Partner: “eh, smells all right.”

Dry: still generic perfume-ish scent. I don’t mind it, but it’s not telling me a story I don’t already know.

5 min: it’s a pretty stable scent!

Medea

Night-blooming cereus, black orchid, black currant and myrtle leaf enshrouded in the incense of Hecate’s cypress and myrrh, and the dark rage of magickal labdanum and intoxicating poppy.

In the imp: perfume. Slightly astringent perfume.

Wet: rose, but rose like in in a powder shop, not rose like sticking my nose in a flower.

Dry: turning a bit sharper. I’m wondering if this is the myrrh note. Like in the imp, I think there’s two things going on here for me. One is the floral scent that smells like rose to me. The other is something sharper that moderates it well.

Verdict: I like Medea better than Ameles Potamos, but I think what I’m looking for right now is less familiar smells, and both of these smell enough like commercial perfume to me that I’m not transported.

I’m shipping a few imps to my mother, I suspect she will quite like these.

ETA: oh dear, Medea keeps getting stronger, and I forgot about my reaction to really strong scents. They make me sneeze a lot. Eek. (I can’t be around people smoking pot for too long, for example.)

BPAL’s Vice

I’ve noticed ‘net friends moving into… cosmetics? self-adornment? fandom of various types over the past few years and while I’ve been fascinated, I haven’t been tempted. That is, until I started running into perfume fandom posts around. Here’s the canonical intro post from rydra-wong, and recessional has scent work posts and then synedochic founded smellsgood and then…

Here we are. I ordered four imps from BPAL. I probably won’t review each of them in their own post, but I was excited.

Vice

Voluptuous and indulgent! A deep chocolate scent, with black cherry and orange blossom.

In the imp: Powerful. More sweet shop than chocolate shop.

My partner (who is quite hostile to strong scents) says: “vanilla and not in a good way.”

Wet: Still very sweet. Nougat? Perfumed nougat? Something like that. I can see how it might be edging to chocolate, but it’s not getting there.

Dry: pretty one-note cherry, I think? I smell like a soap shop. This is not unpleasant, it brings back nostalgia for long lost crafty shops where I couldn’t afford a bar for Mother’s Day.

10 minutes later: oooo… there’s the orange blossom. That’s quite nice.

20 minutes later: I think the cherry and the orange blossom are mostly in harmony, but I’m not getting chocolate. I’m glad the very very sweet edge to it has gone.

This does smell good, but I am bothered by the clash with the name. I smell like a slightly spicy flower, which is not really what I’d call Vice, as such. What would Vice smell like? Liqueur and tobacco and sweat maybe?

This makes me very tempted to try The Ankythera Mechanism tomorrow, for the tobacco note. Does anyone have any recommendations for a BPAL scent that really does smell of vice?

That said, I’ll probably keep it. There are days when smelling like this would work for me.

Early reactions to Karen Healey’s While We Run

Spoilers for all of When We Wake and the first few chapters of While We Run

Aw yeah!

I enjoyed the first book, When We Wake, a lot, but it didn’t really seem to have enough consequences in it. The heavy-handed merciless government of future Australia is going to ship refugee slaves into space, and Tegan escapes from them on a bicycle? How likely is that?

… not that likely. Which is why, in the early parts of When We Wake, she’s paying the price. And worse, Abdi is paying an even higher one. It’s hard reading but also, getting towards the stakes that would be at issue.

And I’m loving Abdi as the narrator this time, especially his sharply divergent reaction to Bethari from Tegan’s, and, to a lesser extent, to Joph too. (But not as divergent. Because who wouldn’t love Joph?)

Drive-by, and Broadchurch

I am a ghost of fandom; barely here in the first place and then gone all year. I hope to return to some meta about my fic Living the revolution, perhaps before another Yuletide.

Otherwise, I shall not be doing Yuletide in 2013, except possibly for treats. And only possibly. Perhaps 2014? I want to get some Australian YA fic some day!

While drifting through your reading list like barely visible fog, some thoughts on Broadchurch:

Broadchurch (spoilers through to end of season 1)

As with anything I like, I read reviews until I find ones that disliked it, and then find out how much I agree with the criticisms. Two things stand out: first, it’s not clear at all to me why it had to be Ellie’s tragedy. It’s useful for the drama, sure, but destroying the most sympathetic/innocent character (other than, perhaps, Beth) is cheap drama. Second, more widely observed, there sure are a lot of secrets in Broadchurch that are more or less the same: pedophilia. Couldn’t someone be a fraudster, or Ed Snowden, or something?

A reviewer somewhere picked up something that couldn’t stop bugging me either: solicitors. No one has one until Susan hires one — it is astoundingly implausible that she wouldn’t, even more so than that Jack wouldn’t — and even after that, none of them speak. For heavens sake, make Alec Hardy work for it. Please.

Some of the background things bugged me too. I didn’t feel ten weeks passing even when they laid on the leaves changing. In addition, Broadchurch seems to have two plumbers, one newsagent, one church which seats about 50 congregants, and yet… there’s a high school? There’s a police station which appears to employ at least 10 officers even before the investigation is staffed? I suppose the high school and police station are associated with the entire district, not the village.

Onto things I liked: Olivia Coleman’s and David Tennant’s performances. His, of course, required far less range, but there’s an impressive moment when Nige is confessing all to him (I don’t think I’m going to make it rich as a plumber so I thought I’d turn to… very petty crime?) where halfway through Nige’s first sentence Tennant’s Hardy is climbing the walls to get away from this complete waste of time. Very amusing. I watched it freeze-frame style.

I appreciated that Hardy’s entitlement and rudeness is called out, and regularly so. All too often, characters with these frankly obnoxious personalities (not that I can’t appreciate the appeal of Hardy’s personality in fiction, but I wouldn’t want to report to him) somehow either to manage to escape in-universe comment, or it’s seen in-universe as the price of their genius.

Hardy also isn’t, in my reading, actually an especially gifted detective (to be fair, nor does anyone expect him to be, it’s a small-town job). He’s competent, and the town is lucky they happen to have hired an outsider just before this particular case, and his personal style and lack of connection with the town lets him do things that Ellie can’t, but he’s not far ahead of anyone else. Clearly, I am rather over anything in the Dr House mode. Surly men aren’t necessarily a lot brighter than anyone else, nor should they get a pass.

While we’re talking Odo

There were actually two fics specifically for The Day Before the Revolution short story this year, and you should check out the other one! This one is by who is also at the centre of Earthsea fanfic.

A Necklace of Acorns (3020 words) by Firerose
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Day Before the Revolution – Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed – Ursula K. Le Guin, Hainish Cycle – Ursula K. Le Guin
Rating: General Audiences
Warning: Author Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Characters: Laia Asieo Odo
Summary:

Only cast pearls before swine if a necklace of acorns becomes you (Sayings of Odo). Glimpses into the life of a revolutionary

We’re done quite different things with Odo in these stories, with Firerose’s Odo being more trickster-ish. I love it! It also more directly references the setting and in particular the economic relationship between Urras and Anarres (which continues all the way into The Dispossessed), and the gender politics of Urras. My story doesn’t have Odo meet anyone who isn’t associated with either the revolutionary movement or the prison system, which drastically limits the exploration of Iotic society.

So I recommend her fic both for a lovely take on Odo and for a good chunk of world-building/world-exploring too!

Hooray, Hainish Cycle for Yuletide! Thank you firerose for your excellent story.