I decided not to review a novel a few weeks ago, because what I was reading got under my skin. Maybe I’m thin-skinned, or maybe I couldn’t adjust to the genre. I didn’t know it was a historic romance until a couple chapters into it. That’s entirely my fault. A few clues on the cover and in the general description should have been enough, but no, I thought it was historical fiction, maybe even a bit of fantasy. I even said to myself, “I hope this doesn’t become a romance,” a few pages before the book swatted me in the gut.
A woman, taken from her home as a child, raised by nurses in a distant land, and well-trained to survive and hide in the wilderness, sees a prince who is searching for her without a clear sense of her. She is hidden in the trees on the mountain side. The wind whips around the prince, pressing his cloak to his skin, and this medieval sylan thinks to herself (paraphrase), “Wow, is his face as handsome as his body?”
Maybe I’m a puritan, but this strikes me as completely out of character.
Later, when the prince is badly injured and she begins to nurse him back to health, the narration dwells on her need to wash him, and bodies have unseemly parts . . . It’s distasteful. It was all written indirectly, because it is a Christian novel, and maybe overall the story accomplished its goal, but I didn’t want to take it in. I’ve read worse, that is, more vulgar narration, but I wouldn’t have it this time. I’m not sure why.
I’ve read worse, that is, more vulgar narration, but I wouldn’t have it this time. I’m not sure why.
Maybe because honestly vulgar narration is better than narration that seeks to arouse the same effect while seeming not to be vulgar?
Ori, I think you may have it.
Yeah, that may be it. I know that’s what my college–Christian college–teachers told me. If a character is going to curse, he should say the words. Don’t draw attention to the narrator by breaking up the dialogue with an editorial comment like, “He cursed.”
In this story, though, I think we don’t need a chapter about her desire to avoid touching certain parts of his body while washing him. And her reaction to him on first site? Shut up.
The “is his face as handsome as his body?” question isn’t too far outside the pale of medieval romances. It may very well be out of character for THAT particular women, but I don’t think it’s out of character for medieval women in general.
The bathing, on the other hand, strikes me (not having read the book) as something Phil is right about. Though I couldn’t read the scene now without comparing it to the (imo) superlatively understated scene in Robin Hood, in which he is partially undressed by Marian. The latter is a textbook case of suggestive romance; the scene by nature has nothing unseemly, but is chock full of romantic resonances nonetheless.
I liked the way Patrick McManus handled cursing characters in The Blight Way and Avalanche. You could tell the level of frustration by the number of letters referenced. Profanity was presented something like, “When he saw the blah blah blah, he uttered three five letter curse words and threw in a seven letter one just for good measure.” Of course, the style of the book was very campy, so avoiding explicit language in such an obvious manner only added to the fun.
Well, even though I barely graduated high school and scraped by everywhere else, I thought was shocked by the woman’s reaction. I would have expected her to have lost that, if she ever had it, in the wilderness and austere lifestyle she had up to that point.
But if it’s normal for romances written in that time, I do feel a little better about it.