truepenny | oh, look, more nit-picking (Reply)

papersky is pandering to my megalomania with an extremely lovely post.

In case anybody was wondering, 764 ms pages translates to approximately nine pounds of paper.

I notice that I haven't posted anything with actual coherency since Wednesday. Should rectify this and write about books or something, but am afraid all that would happen is I would nit-pick Those Who Hunt the Night to death. I'm on that n+1 reading where suddenly all the flaws come swarming up at me (kind of like those monster cockroaches in "Grave"), and it's just going to get ugly.

In particular, it's striking me especially this time what very heavily loaded language she uses to describe Ysidro; everything is about his eyes and the beauty of his face and hands and hair. Now, if this were Traveling with the Dead, I wouldn't be worried about it, because (a.) that book's all about romance cliches and (b.) the PoV from which we see Ysidro is that of a heterosexual female. TwtD takes that romantic language and disassembles it, piece by piece. (It also does a much better job of capturing what a Catholic Spanish aristocrat who was made a vampire in 1555 would really be like to talk to and work with.) But TWHtN is NOT about the romance cliche bit; moreover, our viewpoint character is a heterosexual man who as far as I can tell genuinely isn't feeling any homoerotic passion for Ysidro at all. Part of TWHtN is whether or not Asher can/should/will feel friendship for Ysidro, but it's just friendship. Except that the language of the narrative is loaded with eroticism, and that eroticism is not undercut. It's even heightened; for example, here's the moment near the end when Asher finds Ysidro in that prison/coffin:

The lid was heavy and fitted close. It was an effort to raise it with one hand. As Asher lifted it clear, Ysidro turned and flinched, trying to shield his face with his shirt-sleeved arms, his long, ghostly hair tangling over the coffin's dark lining beneath his head. "No ..."

...

"Close it." The long fingers that covered the vampire's eyes were shaking; beneath them Asher could see the white-lashed eyes shut in pain. The light voice was sunk to a whisper, shivering, like his hands, under the strain of exhaustion and despair. "Please, close it. There is nothing we can do."

Knowing he was right, Asher obeyed.
(Hambly 203)

I don't think you have to be particularly sensitive to subtext to feel the charge here. And it's weird. Not so much for the Romantic Vampire shtick--that's all over the place these days, and it's quite feasible to read TwtD as a reaction to some of the questions TWHtN fails to ask--but for this tremendous erotic charge that seems to exist, not between the two characters, but solely in the narrative language. Asher is married and passionately in love with his wife; when this scenario is reversed in TwtD, when Asher is imprisoned and Ysidro and Lydia are searching for him, Hambly is very explicit about the way in which the vampire glamour both creates and horribly mutilates romantic love: Lydia loves Asher as passionately as he loves her, but she is also drawn to Ysidro, partly because, as Ysidro tells Asher at the end of the book, that's how vampires hunt, partly because Ysidro has got charisma and magnetism coming out his ears, and partly because Ysidro himself is falling in love with Lydia. And when we hack our way out of that appalling sentence to my point, it is that if she intended there to be romantic tension between Asher and Ysidro, she would have stuck it in openly enough to be recognized. Of course, since Hambly's major characters are always heterosexual (unless that isn't true in Sisters of the Raven which I frankly just couldn't be bothered to read, after the third unimpressed review I read), there's probably not any homoerotic tension intended whatsoever. It's just sitting there in the language, like a toad. And it's weird, because I genuinely can't figure out what it's doing there or what its purpose is supposed to be.

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WORKS CITED
Hambly, Barbara. Those Who Hunt the Night. New York: Del Rey-Ballantine, 1988.