Reader Ramblings: LMB, LRK, DLS and Thematic Dissatisfaction

[ase]

kate_nepveu read the first four Russell/Holmes novels recently and while discussing A Monstrous Regiment of Women says, "not only does it set up false choices for Russell, it then deliberately takes them away from her!" She also mentions Gaudy Night. ("[S]uffers badly from wanting to be Gaudy Night and failing miserably." Ouch.) The juxtaposition of those two comments made my brain leap universes and think about Ekaterin's choices, particularly that question about her aunt the Professora.

She had a top place in her profession - might she have had a place at the top? She had three children - might she have had six?
-Komarr, ch 17; pg242 American HC

The quote shoots home to my dissatisfaction with both books: there's a common theme of romance being part of a larger character concern or area the character is reluctant to deal with. The romance complications are solved by marriage, and by authorial fiat the associated larger concerns are swept into that resolution. Only by my reading of the story, those other problems aren't, and linger on, thematically unresolved, at the novel's close.

In Ekaterin's case, a bunch of self-doubt and questions about career versus children are swept under the rug when she and Miles become engaged, which is problematic because a bunch of those questions rose out of her experience with her first marriage. Her earlier rejection of marriage ever isn't necessarily the right answer, but agreeing to jump back into the intstitution less than a year after her first husband's death doesn't seem plausible. The dissolution of Ekaterin's fears into premarital excitement works in the first frission of ACC, but pushes the really hard questions aside. If LMB ever writes another Vorkosigan book, some of those questions about family and responsibility to yourself vs. responsibility to others may crop up again if (when) Aral dies, Miles assumes the Countship, and Ekaterin becomes Countess Vorkosigan, which Simon Illyan pointed out (in ACC) is a job in itself.

Mary Russell faces some of that same dynamic push-pull in Monstrous Regiment, usually in more than one direction. Margery Childe and Sherlock Holmes both make demands on her time in London as she assumes her majority and tries to undertake what she considers her "real" work: a theological presentation at Oxford. It's tempting to try to spin an Oxford v. London argument, but a lot of Mary's options revolve around London v. London, or more accurately the attractions of Childe, Holmes and the possibilities they represent. The academic and theological possibilities of Oxford are present, but tend to take a back seat to the emotional questions found in London. The main question in the London v. Oxford debate might be the nature of Mary's relationship with God ("cold", Margery says in a really cool and dramatic speech) which ties into the emotion debate that's part of the Childe/Holmes question. Ultimately, the deck's a bit stacked in the direction of Holmes and against both Oxford and Childe (whose name might be an indicator of authorial intent, since Monstrous Regiment is fairly explicitly a story about maturity), so the questions raised about emotion and the value of Mary's work in Oxford are swept aside for the happy romantic ending.

(Tangent: is it just me, or does Mary's academic career spend a lot of time sidelined in the course of the series? Work on an academic book is interrupted by A Letter of Mary, and the series spends that novel and the next four dashing from case to work-interrupting case. She takes it awfully well, on the whole.)

Nepveu also asks in her post, "I'm starting to wonder if this is a subgenre, books written in obvious tribute to Gaudy Night." It makes me wonder how much of Ekaterin Vorsoisson's and Mary Russell's character arcs were inspired by GN, and whether the resolutions I found so incomplete might be an inadvertent effect of the authors echoing GN's plot and some of its themes, but changing things around enough that the conclusion of the romance doesn't tie things up as neatly as Sayers did in GN. (If she really does resolve things that well in GN - I read it once, when I was 15 or 16, it was my first Sayers, and I know I missed things left, right and center. Currently, I can scarcely remember what happened in the story.)

Comments

Aral

[coalboy.livejournal.com]

I don't see why Aral has to die -yet-; there are all sorts of things to write about, he's got a new heart, Ivan!

Re: Aral

[ase.livejournal.com]

I think that thematically it's time. The last couple Bujold novels have been very nice: good wins, evil is vanquished, lives are saved. Lois hasn't played the worst-thing game as harshly - or as interestingly - as in some of the earlier Vorkosigan novels. The story, and the characters, need to be shaken a bit. YMMV, of course.