The Loinfire Club doesn't read... An Affair Before Christmas

An Affair Before Christmas, by Eloisa James

Magic under the mistletoe . . .

One spectacular Christmas, Lady Perdita Selby, known to her friends and family as Poppy, met the man she thought she would love forever. The devilishly attractive Duke of Fletcher was the perfect match for the innocent, breathtakingly beautiful young Englishwoman, and theirs was the most romantic wedding she had ever seen. Four years later, Poppy and the duke have become the toast of the ton . . . but behind closed doors the spark of their love affair has burned out.

Unwilling to lose the woman he still lusts after, the duke is determined to win back his beguiling bride's delectable affections . . . and surpass the heady days of first love with a truly sinful seduction.

In Short:

Affair is a good book, but it crosses the Chronicler in two fundamental ways, which she understands that most readers really wouldn't care about, but they irritate her and so she inflicts this review upon the world.

The Good

This really isn't a bad book. And as a romance novel it is really quite awesome. The characters were plausible and behaved in a reasonable manner. The heroine had none of the standard hang-ups about her girly bits and the hero doesn't behave like a rapist. The blurb is exceptionally deceptive as it sets up the expectation of one of those "forced seduction" plotlines in which the hero tries to win back his wife and solve all the problems between them with his manly all-powerful cock.*

The Balance did point out to me that the Chronicler is perhaps too excited by the fact that Affair rejects many of the common tropes of romance novels and that in itself really shouldn't be enough to cause such undying love.

Poppy is the star of the book. She comes out of the personality her overbearing mother forged for her (and supposedly desired by her husband) and becomes her own person. And that is a delight to watch. She moves in with her friend the scandalous Duchess of Beaumont and is encouraged by her to do as she desires.

Poppy is a bit too much of a beautiful and unique snowflake at times (see below) and certainly her hobbies could do with better foreshadowing. Equally, I understand the desire to open in medias res but I'd like to have seen more of the earlier Poppy under the influence of her mother and in her disastrous marriage. I wanted to see the whole transition from timid mouse to angry lioness (or some other such silly metaphor) rather than just the last leg when she realises her mother's hold over her. She realises two chapters in that she has been living out her mother's ideals and starts the search for her sense of self. I would have rather seen a more gradual dawning. But overall, there is such satisfaction in seeing a romance novel heroine with hobbies, a spine and a life of her own that is independent of loving the hero, I could almost forgive anything.

The heroine's apparent frigidity (the source of the Big Misunderstanding and four years of misery) is resolved in a brilliant, brilliant manner. She is allowed to come to terms with her own sexuality by herself in her own time. And her husband is happy with that. He loves her enough to compromise. He appreciates her on levels besides the groin and his compromise shows this. He doesn't quite grovel and he was arguably a bit stand-offish, but forgivably so.

Suffice to say I was ecstatic. Heroine discovered her own sexuality by herself. I really can't get over how great that scene was. I have some problems with it (perhaps it came a bit too quickly, surely there are issues besides that, hero is really too much of a perfect lover making his earlier failure a bit implausible, though not impossible.) But as said, really really happy making.

Hero and his neurosis are plausible. The characters behaved like sensible, thinking, feeling people. Not always as good as communicating as they could be, but the marriage falls apart on an understandable inability to communicate and it is resolved. It is arguably a Big Misunderstanding, but James made it work and work well.

The subplot involving the two chess games of the Duchess of Beaumont are intriguing, but considering how little that plot progresses it takes up far too much of the book. The feelings of the three involved (Jemma, Villiers the lover and Elijah the estranged husband) are deliciously complicated but are never really elucidated or explored. Probably because it's supposed to have a book of its own, I am left frustrated and irritated rather than my appetite whetted for her next offering. Perhaps if it was more concise or more clear, then it would have worked better as a lead into the next book, but as it stands, I'm left confused and frustrated.

And Villiers also spends far, far too much of the book dying. Ever other chapter of the same groaning really wears thin my sympathy.

Eloisa James' prose is a cut above the rest, though not flawless. I wouldn't quite call it sparkling, as it suffers from the romance novel propensity for inappropriate metaphors,** but I suppose that's a given considering the genre.

The Bad:

Affair has one main flaw: one being that the characters are beautiful and unique snowflakes occupying a setting that is consciously made more restrictive to show off how beautiful and unique they are. And I really hate this with a passion of a thousand burning, burning suns.*** The underlying assumption of this sort of writing is that I as a reader am incapable of sympathising or empathising with cultures which aren't my own. Therefore the past becomes merely the present in funny clothes. And this assumption I find fundamentally insulting (and irritating) in many, many ways.

Perhaps because it is so widespread (within and without romance novels) that I really don't want to criticise James too much on this front. After all, Shakespeare and Chaucer did it, didn't they?

Time and time again, in the little details, James betrays that she's not really thinking about the characters as products of their own time and culture. Poppy, for example, finds it difficult to walk in side-panniers. After over four years of wearing them almost every day? I disbelieve. As a larper, I can testify that even hoopskirts (and corsets) can become comfortable and manoeuvrable after sufficient practice. It seems bizarre that Poppy shouldn't feel comfortable in them.

There is a constant rejection of Regency fashion, ideals, rhetoric and ways of doing things. Poppy decides that she must wash herself and her own hair after she realises her maid is not to be trusted. (I disbelieve that all French maids are so incompetent.) The House of Lords is enamoured at Fletch's new and inspired (modern) way of giving a speech: tell it like a story without rhetorical flourishes.**** Fletch refuses to powder his own hair. He dresses and washes himself. Poppy eventually comes round to his way of doing things. She eventually abandons French hairstyles and side panniers, but even before that she insisted on washing her hair and bathing every day. Poppy's mother slapping her is a Big Deal.

James also portrays eighteenth century society as more restrictive than it actually is, perhaps to highlight how unique and rebellious her characters are in their rejection of the norm. The Royal Society was offering lectures specifically with women in mind as an audience.***** It became fashionable to attend for women and with women. Women were more welcome to the sciences than other fields of study do it not being traditionally part of men's education (Oxbridge didn't offer it, after all). The paradigms of the time were more complicated than the simple: women are beautiful brainless objects. This is not to say they conformed to modern western liberal (or conservative) ideals. However, it's not that simple and not that oppressive (or maybe just differently oppressive.)

The point is that Poppy attending a lecture at the Royal Society isn't as daring or as controversial as the book makes it out to be.

The contrast between the English and French is overplayed and stereotypical. And strangely not far-reaching enough. Poppy should be scandalised by the Duchess of Beaumont's French slatternly behaviour in being in her dressing gown all day, for example. James on uses the English/French contrast when it suits her and really only in relation to sexuality. It's one dimensional and clichéd.

Lady Flora, Poppy's mother, first came off as a remarkably sympathetic character. Overbearing, certainly, but she seemed to have her daughter's interests at heart. And her experiences of the marriage bed really rather justifies her belief of it being a repulsive place. She's not "right" in inflicting her own neurosis on her daughter and all, but she's justified and it's understandable. I had suspected her to be a lesbian considering her descriptions of intercourse. She seems shaped by her experiences and though the result isn't a particularly pleasant woman, she's admirable for her strength of character and the extent of her ambition.

But no. In the last few chapters, Lady Flora is character-raped. She is stripped of her dignity and her reasons of behaving the ways she did and is instead shipped off to the nunnery by the plot and is revealed to have been indulging in the services of a male prostitute. I was indignant. I could make no sense of the character. Or rather, now she seems to be an enormous hypocrite and simply vindictive in her actions, rather than an overbearing but well-meaning mother.

Her "abuse" of Poppy taken in the context of the time is perfectly normal. Perhaps in that James and I differ, which is why Lady Flora must be tarred and feathered for all to see, shown to be a hypocrite and secretly submitting to the greatness that is the male phallus.

Other:

The Balance points out that the rule for slutty women emerging in James' books seems to be that they are only allowed their indiscretions when their attempt at a monogamous relationship has failed. Rather than start another, they have a series of affairs.



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Footnotes
* There is only one reference to its unusual size and for that I am thankful (I'm really not sure how heroes find out about these things out in ages of few statisticians; I'm sure all those courtesans/mistresses are but happy to flatter regardless.)

** Romance novel authors on a whole seem to forget that when you say something is like something else, not only the named property is conjured up and transferred. So egg-yolk yellow hair isn't just a really worrying shade of yellow for hair, it also calls to mind the consistency and texture of egg-yolk.

***Which may or may not be flaccid.

**** They all went to Oxbridge. "Just tell a story" really shouldn't float with them. And the simplifying of what would eventually become the Corn Laws, this highly complicated issue in English economic and political history, into "Bob the Farmer isn't selling his corn for enough money" insults my intelligence. I know there isn't time to go into all the details of the issue, but at least make me feel that the character who is supposed to be intelligent grasps some of it? Oh, and Eloisa James has no idea how debates in the House of Lords works. She makes it sound like the American Congress.

***** From the Balance, who studies the history of science. This is what he remembers from the Lecture, though he seems to have trouble finding an exact reference for the moment.