Beyond Selidor

I made it to the pool and back this morning without being rained on, which, given the weather this weekend is something of an achievement. It's been showering on and off since late Friday night, including torrential rain that blew horizontally under our umbrellas (and under the stall's marquee) during the time Matthias and I were at the market buying vegetables yesterday. It's very much been a weekend in which to hunker down at home, and stay as cosy as possible. After I've finished writing this post, I'm going to start preparing dinner — a juliusroberts roast chicken which he calls 'epic tarragon chicken,' which seems like the perfect nourishing choice for a cold rainy Sunday.

Yuletide assignments are out, and I'm pretty pleased with mine — lots of interesting prompts into which to sink my teeth, and my recipient seems to like the same things in canon that I do. I'm going to let ideas brew for a few days before settling on a final choice for the assignment. (And as an aside, it does feel this year as if I were going into the exchange more blindly than usual. I may be imagining things, but it felt like there were fewer letters, and less buzz around adding them to the letters app, or post, and so on. That may be a false impression, but it's certainly the sense I got.)

I have been reading quite a bit, and all of it's been enjoyable.

Earlier in the week, I read Nocturne (Alyssa Wees), a YA novel set in 1930s Chicago which interweaves retellings of Beauty and the Beast, the Hades and Persephone myth, and Phantom of the Opera. The prose is lush (verging on purple), and the setting I felt was underdone (a sprinkling of cliches), but the author's evocation of the experiences of professional ballet dancers, and especially what it feels like as a performer to perform had the ring of truth. I'm not sure I can completely recommend it — I found it enjoyable, while essentially mentally averting my eyes from its many flaws.

I then reread Adèle Geras's Egerton Hall trilogy. These are books that I first read in primary school (when I was definitely slightly too young to take in everything they were doing), published in the 1990s but set in an English girls' boarding school in the early 1960s. Each book is narrated in first person by a different teenage girl — a trio of close friends in the boarding school — retelling the fairy tales of Rapunzel, Sleeping Beauty, and Snow White respectively. I have been reading and rereading these books for the past thirty years, and have always been impressed by the ambition of what Geras was trying to achieve, and the fact that she was able to achieve it — in YA novels, in so few pages (each book is about 150 pages long). On one level, they are spectacular works of historical fiction, capturing vividly the mores and pop culture of a very specific time and place, in a way that plays on the senses. You can almost feel the candlewick bedsheets and rustling 1960s dresses, or taste the bland insitutional cooking in the boarding school and the hot chips and tea cakes smothered with butter ('real butter!' as the characters rhapsodise, as opposed to the margarine they get at school) eaten on Saturday trips into the village neighbouring their school. The prose itself is lovely — flowing and unobtrusive, with memorable turns of phrase that have stuck with me since I first encountered the books. But where Geras truly triumphs here is as a reteller of fairy tales: the rarefied lives of these upper middle class girls, tucked away in their boarding school or in carefully circumscribed social activities in which they are shielded from the complications and difficulties of the wider world are their own kind of fairytale unreality, making the bizarre sequences of events drawn from the source material feel plausible and solid. And I have seen a lot of Goodreads reviews criticising these books for their 'unbelievable' romance (the insta-love based on little more than a glimpse or a conversation) — but that to me is the most believable part of them. I wouldn't go so far to say they are universally representative of teenage female sexuality, but the intensity of emotion, the tendency to imbue minor events with epic, poetic, portentous significance — all of that is painfully familiar to me (in the sense of 'teenage me is in this picture, and she doesn't like it'). There's some stuff in the books that you just have to roll with (and if you can't get past it, you will not have much fun with them) — they are aggressively heterosexual, and there is the aforementioned insta-love, often with people we'd consider wildly innappropriate (the Rapunzel book is about a romance between a seventeen-year-old schoolgirl and the new 22-year-old lab assistant in her school; he's not her teacher, but it's obviously not a relationship most of us would be comfortable with). They are not romance novels, even though romantic love is the ribbon that runs through them — they are fairytale retellings, and among the best I've ever read.

Finally, I read (for the first time) The Throne of Caesar, the concluding book in Steven Saylor's Roma sub Rosa historical mystery series. I have read all the other books in the series many times, but at some point I stopped keeping up with the series, and until this year had no idea that Saylor had written this book, which focuses on the days immediately before and after the assassination of Julius Caesar. In his author's note, Saylor mentions that he had avoided writing about this period — even though it was the logical conclusion to his series, which starts during Sulla's dictatorship and follows the next few decades of the erosion and death of the Roman republic, with each book involving a mystery linked to key political events during that time period — because, as it was one of the most well-known political assassinations in history, he couldn't think of anything about it that could be a mystery for his ancient Roman sleuth to solve. In the end, he managed to find an angle — and a mystery — and wrapped everything up neatly. The series (most of which was published in the 2000s) is explicitly linked to Saylor's own sense of anxiety and despair at American national politics and international relations during the George W. Bush period, and this last book, which was written in 2014 (but published in 2018) seems as much to be closing a door on those previous political anxieties (which seem now so small, with the hindsight of what was to come) as on the series' characters. I can't help but wonder what they would have been like if he'd started the series a decade later.

I'm talking about crime novels that explore contemporary political concerns (and more specifically, the erosion of freedom in pursuit of security) here. Spoilers for The Tiger in the Well, Farthing and the Roma Sub Rosa series abound.