bookkeeping: addendum

[truepenny]

Proj2.3: 942 words

Today's total: 3126 words

Verdict: Yee-ha!

And you're stopping because ... ? Time for bed.

***
Rereading Ngaio Marsh's Overture to Death, which I think may be her best book. It's certainly the one I always home in on when I feel a need to reread Marsh. I like Troy very much, but I dislike almost all of the books Marsh wrote about her. Comfort reading? Yes, indeedy. I should be reading Affinity, so I can give it back to HL, or The Fall of the Kings, because it's been sitting one-quarter read on the bookcase since World Fantasy, or Perdido Street Station (Mieville) or The Mount (Emshwiller) in prep for WisCon, but no, here I sit reading Overture to Death for the umpteenth time. I think it's some sort of multiversal hangover from the alternate reality in which I was a juvenile delinquent, that as soon as I look at a book and think, I ought to read that, I abruptly lose all interest in it. ... This may also explain something about why I am taking so very fucking long to finish my dissertation.

Comments

[pameladean]

Toddling in late as usual -- my favorite Marshes are Killer Dolphin and its sequel, especially its sequel, Light Thickens. I love any of the theatrical ones, though. Night at the Vulcan. I hadn't thought of it before about the Troy books, but certainly Artists in Crime is an exceptionally nasty piece of work, not only in the murder device but in its weird attitudes about sex and purity. I sometimes think Marsh didn't really like women. Maybe she hated gender stereotypes and confused them with the people inside them. I could see that. I like Death in a White Tie all right, but it's not very substantial aside from Troy.

Pamela

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

I love Night at the Vulcan and False Scent because they're such complete fairy tales. False Scent also has her only even remotely positive portrayal of a gay character (unless you think Katti is a lesbian with a lech for Troy, which could be)--considering what you were saying about Artists in Crime, maybe she just had a Thing about sex? Certainly sex and sexual passion are viewed with deep suspicion in all her works and Alleyn and Troy's romance is depicted almost entirely in terms of the mind and emotions, not the body. (Not like, for instance, Harriet and Peter and the tigers conversation in Busman's Honeymoon.) And while she makes fun of Miss Prentice and Miss Campanula in Overture to Death for being prurient sex-obsessives, it's also true that the young lovers are pure and chaste and the runners-up in the Least Sympathetic Characters Competition are the adulterers. People who HAVE SEX in Marsh novels (as opposed to married couples who for all we know may have separate bedrooms, or courting couples, who of course haven't gone that far yet) seem to be generally unsympathetic. (I'm thinking of Dead Water here, but also Death in Ecstasy and A Man Lay Dead and Death and the Dancing Footman and I could probably go on, but I think I won't.) So maybe it's a sex thing rather than a gender thing.