The Great Grand List

It's been a little while and I've been neglecting this blog (but then the Club hasn't exactly been having dozens of meetings since the last update), but I was reading Let Them Eat and was having a good rummage around my brain as to why romance novels annoyed me so much and I though I'd have it out once and for all, before the individual nit-picking overtook any sensible discussion of why I'm continuously disappointed in the genre:

1) I want it to show the diversity of love.

I want cultural differences. I want to be shown all the different sorts of relationships build across time and space (and all those fantasy lands). I want to see people conducting relationships in a way different from my own.

But instead, it only shows the same Perfect relationship in all times, in all places, in all settings. Instead of showing me cultural and personal variation, the audience is shown that all cultures and all Perfect Couples conduct their relationship more-or-less the same way and the setting is only wallpaper.

2) I want it to revel in imperfect love.

It's what always warms my heart. A relationship in all its little, bittersweet (but mostly sweet) imperfections. It's the little irritations that make it seem real and solid and human.

But instead, it only shows me more-or-less the same flawless relationship, where the Perfect Couple are simply telepathically perfect in bed, flawlessly work together and never, ever disagree trivially. True Love is shown to be completely effortless. For example, the hero, once he's found the heroine, is incapable of finding anyone (male or female) attractive ever again.

3) I want them to be honest.

The rhetoric around romance novels annoys me. The way the novel is discussed, reviewed, presented. It's the way the novel is presented as an examplar of Perfect Love as opposed to simply an instance of love, however flawed but true. It's not even presented as a fantasy, as something that is decidedly undesirable in reality. Kresley Cole's A Hunger Like No Other begins with what is essentially a rape fantasy. There is absolutely nothing wrong with having one and writing one, but it would be nice if she and the readers showed some self-awareness when it comes to discussing it. Perhaps I'm very used to the rhetoric of "safe, sane and consentual", but the framing of the relationship as desirable, as "true love" and the hero's actions as justified all repel me.

I am quite capable of saying that I like reading about imperfect, functioning but really-fucked-up relationships. Time Traveller's Wife is probably a prime example in which the narrative itself admits how really rather messed up the whole thing is. Though, to be fair, I'm not going to go read any reviews; It'll probably just annoy me.

4) I want the setting to do something more than just prop up and excuse the audience's desires for the same old configurations and the same old prejudices.

I want it to be well thought-out. I want it to not be built around the author's desire to write about a string of Alpha men in a series. And I really don't want to hear the same old about the Importance of Virginity.

Opinions, perceptions and manifestations of love and desire differ throughout the ages. I want to read about it. Really ties back into point-number-one.

But this feeds into a larger point about how work is gendered and the sheer invisibility of women in fantasy fiction doing anything else other than generically rebelling, being housewives or being "ladies." Though that said, this is slowly, slowly changing.

5) It seems to deny that people can have a complex sexuality.

It seems to deny that people can have quite a different sexuality than their regular selves. It seems to deny that nice, quiet people can be dominant in bed (or vice versa). The Hero's extreme Alpha personality is a sign of how dominant he is in bed. Less alpha men are shown to be less sexually capable and less dominant in the bedroom.

Perhaps I'm just rather too aware of how geeky the kinky community can be (being a regular reader of Mistress Matisse and Twisted Monk), but it irks me that as opposed to showing the complexities of human sexuality and how surprising it can be, romance novels are wont to confirm first impressions, as though we all wore our "bedroom face" on our sleeves. Equally, the paired trope in which the sexual self is seen as the True Self is highly problematic.

The Chronicler reviews the rest of The Darkest Kiss

The Darkest Kiss, by Gena Showalter

After the Loinfire Club struggled through the first chapter of The Darkest Kiss, the Chronicler picked it up (always the masochist when it comes to terrible fiction

) and decided to finish it. Here follows a report for those who are curious about how the story about Anarchy and Death live happily ever after...

First of all, The Darkest Kiss is really quite a bad book, but it doesn't suffer from the stereotypical problems of normal romance novels. The heroine is more free of the classic I Am Not A Slut complex than most (with one or two incredibly annoying and notable exceptions, but I'll get to that.) The hero isn't full of rape and ravishment threats, doesn't stalk the heroine, invade her personal space and call it love.... And yet all this doesn't stop it from being really quite an annoying book.

The World Setting

The Chronicler is that most of The Darkest Kiss' readers probably don't care about the metaphysics of its fictional universe and exactly how it all operates. Given that it's the second book in the series, perhaps it should not be expected to lay down the setting with introductory simplicity. And yet it makes no effort to advertise it's Not-the-First-Book status.* That said, the Chronicler really doubts her problems with the setting are answered in the previous book.

The setting is riddled with sweeping statements and loopholes. For example, the origin story is mind-boggling:

Once upon a time, there was Pandora's Box (aka dimOuniak) and in it were lots of demons. These warriors, led by one who felt insulted he didn't get to guard it (?!), opened the box. As punishment, they were made into living prisons for the demons.

Now, this story seems simple. Or at least. Showalter thinks so. But it's not. She's vague as to how much our version applies. Was the pre-box-opening free from Death, Pain, Promiscuity, Lies and all that? Are these simply demons of the concepts as in they are the physical embodiment of them, free from personality and scheming or are they more sophisticated? Were they physical, as in, after release, did the demons personally kill/rape/torture/lie to everyone in their way or did they just possess people and make them do so?

The Chronicler really wants answers because it's actually relevant to the plot. Galen, the Keeper of Hope... wait, Hope is a good thing, right? It was in the original. So why was the demon of it imprisoned in the box along with the other demons? Was the pre-box-opening world also free from hope? And if it's a good thing, should he be allowed to go about and do his work, keeping people's spirits up despite all the death, promiscuity, lies, doubt, defeat (etc) that is happening all over the place?... Sorry, derailed myself there. Galen, who has demon of Hope imprisoned inside him, is running around being the leader of an organisation that busies itself tracking down the imprisoned demons** and killing them all, because the blame the demons for all the shitty things that happen.

The main characters are justified in not knowing what would happen if the imprisoned demons are killed, but they seem phenomenally uncurious about the effects of their death. Baden, Keeper of Distrust, has died and the world doesn't seem to be devoid of distrust, but you can't really fault the hopeful warriors of Galen to keep trying. I'm really okay with them being selfish about their own death versus the world being painless forever, but can they not at least consider the possibilities? What would answer my question is a description about the pre-box-opening world, but Showalter just doesn't want to share.

But then we get to other metaphysical problems. The Greek deities are real. Fair enough. And they differ somewhat from legend, which is again, fair enough. Though it would be better if Showalter actually acknowledges these differences and addressed them, since of all the pantheons the average person would have heard of Greek is quite high on the list. But the immediate question that follows is: Are any other pagan pantheons real? They certainly aren't geographically confined to their original continent, so where is everyone else? They don't have to exist, but it's just really odd because there is a Christian heaven and hell, where some select souls get to go after death (very select, I'll come to that), and yet there are no other gods. Showalter doesn't even feel the need to say, "I know the ancient Greeks believed in an underworld that's different, but that's because they're wrong and were off their tits on mushrooms." Most books employing an existing mythology in its world-building puts in a line or two, the standard: "What a silly superstition you humans have about garlic and vampires. We fear it not."

The Anthropologist suggests perhaps that Showalter simply doesn't realise that other religions have a different vision of heaven and hell. But then she does as she mentions Hades later, but it doesn't seem to feature in any great way.

It's just weird to try to fuse the two.

 

Lucien, Incarnation of Death

Which really quite neatly brings me to Death Himself. Now, beauty is the eye of the beholder and all that, but it really defeats the point of having an ugly hero if the heroine finds him irresistible. The point of Beauty and the Beast is that Beauty grows to love him despite his appearance and eventually grows to love his appearance as well (the latter part surfaces in modern retellings and I quite like it.) But if she thinks he's walking porn to begin with, then he might as well be walking porn to everyone else.

He scrubbed a hand over his face, the scars so puckered they abraded his palm. Had they scratched Anya?

Anya's over-the-top attraction to Lucien comes across as delusional. His descriptions of himself as horrifically scarred don't add up to her descriptions of him. He wonders if his scars are scratching her but whe

n we're reading from her point of view, Anya hasn't even noticed, which is weird considering how much attention she was paying to him.

Now that I think about it, who is the man on the cover? He has the mismatched eyes of Lucien, but he lacks the horrific scaring. Also, as the Anthropologist notes, MrCoverModel is incapable of ever moving his arms since it would distort his carefully placed shoulder tattoo.

Lucien's insecurities are ridiculous. He obsesses about how Anya is perfect and how he is so scarred all her attraction must be feigned... but what is most annoying is that he possesses the ability to see emotions with his damned SpirtEye. He saw her passion. But after this one use of his magic power, he doesn't really use it again in the book. He doesn't even use it to see if Anya's faking it. Seriously.

In this spiritual realm, Anya’s passion appeared a blazing pink. Real. Not faked, as a part of him had assumed. That pink trail glittered with a dazzle unlike anything he’d ever seen.

 

Lucien, Keeper of Death

But that's not really the bone I want to pick when it comes to Lucien and his job of soul-ferrying. He insists he hates his job and that he finds the taking of innocents distasteful, but he never really articulates this hatred as anything other than (as Azrael puts it) the hatred one has for an exceptionally dull desk job. If he believed that his own death would stop death forever in the world and if his existence was really that joyless... wouldn't he try to end it? Why doesn't he have some sort of philosophical stance on the necessity of death, if only to justify to himself his existence and not feel like a bastard?

Now he was charged with the responsibility of collecting human souls and escorting them to their final resting place. Even if he opposed the idea. He did not like taking innocents from their families, found no joy in delivering the wicked to their damnation, but he did both without question or hesitation

One isn't really sure how free will and the gods (keepers?) interact. Is he personally responsible for the deaths of his victims or not? He didn't chose to have the demon of death stuck inside him, but then if he believes what he's doing is truly Evil. He mysteriously thinks he is, but he arrives at the scene and sees the mangled bodies of the soon-to-be dead. (The Anthropologist notes a quick comparison thing to Death of the Pratchett's books, who sees his job as a necessity but doesn't see any reason to make it any worse for the people concerned.) Lucien thrusts his arm into the chests of the dying, retrieves their soul, teleports to the gates of either heaven or hell and tosses them in, all rather unceremoniously. I understand he's on a tight schedule, but really, it can't be pleasant. Nor does it seem very Greek since they have ideas about Charon, the ferryman of Hades.

He was still at a loss as the pearled gates opened wide, revealing golden streets and bejeweled, arched lampposts hanging like diamond-studded clouds. White-clothed angels lined the sides, singing a melodious welcome, their feathered white wings gliding gracefully behind them.

I can't get over how Christian heaven and hell are. Pearly gates with golden streets is very specifically Christian. It's straight out of The Book of Revelations, "The twelve gates were twelve pearls, each gate being made from a single pearl." There is nothing of this in Greek mythology and it is jarring. But that isn't what is getting to me.

“Lots of people die. Every minute. Every hour. Why don’t you have to escort all of them?”
“Some remain to wander Earth, some are reborn and get the chance to start anew. Some, I think, are escorted by angels.”

That practically makes him redundant. I know that he can't be too tied up with this whole soul-ferrying business since he needs to have time for being with Anya and hanging around with his heterosexual friends, but it really diminishes the character when we find out he doesn't deal with all death, that he's just one soul-collector amongst many.

HE WAS KNOWN AS THE Dark One. Malach ha-Maet. Yama. Azreal. Shadow Walker. Mairya. King of the Dead. He was all of those things and more, for he was a Lord of the Underworld...

The other odd thing is what qualifies as evil enough to land a soul in hell.

The man’s sins suddenly flickered through the demon’s awareness and in turn through Lucien’s. As the man had already proven, he had considered himself above the law, slaying anyone who got in his way—men, women, children—all in the name of a better world.
Bastard.
Maintaining a strong grip on the protesting spirit, he flashed to the entrance of hell. Not Hades—that gloomy underworld was reserved for those who did not deserve either the tortures of hell or the glories of heaven. This man deserved the flames. Though the gates to the fire pit were closed, Lucien could feel the intense heat radiating, could hear the symphony of tormented screams inside, the demonic laughter. The jeers. The stifling scent of sulfur permeated the entire area, enough to make a man gag.

Firstly, as the Anthropologist points out, considering himself above the law isn't really more than what Anya is doing in her daily life. Given how many legal systems Lucien must have lived through, it seems odd that he would attach that much significance to any actual law code.

But more importantly, this man wasn't just working for a better world. He was working for a world that is devoid of pain, suffering, death, war, lies... He is working for paradise on earth. I'm not saying that I feel this means he deserves heaven, I'm just saying that in his paradigm, it's justified and I'm uncomfortable with the idea that this man deserves eternal torment. I'm uncomfortable with the adamance with which the hero thinks this. I'm not saying that I personally believe that the ends justifies the means every time, but there are many things that have been done in the name of the Greater Good and these things do include the American War of Independence (picking an example that most Americans would like to think of as a Good Thing) and the French Revolution and the Cultural Revolution.***** Perhaps again it is that Showalter doesn't think that the audience may disagree on this point, that her reader won't read that and feel uncomfortable. It's that the Universe judges it so with Absolute Morality, not simply the hero's personal morality.

Two bodies lay on the floor, a man and a woman. The man, Lucien instantly knew thanks to his demon, had wrongly suspected the woman of cheating on him, had shot her and then turned the gun on himself.
Bastard, he thought, then stilled.

Now, I'm not saying that killing your girlfriend for cheating on you is morally right. But again, I'm uncomfortable with the idea that it deserves eternal torment in hell. Eternal is a very long time, like seriously. And he did kill himself afterwards. I'm not saying that I like him or that he deserves heaven, but eternity in hell?

Furthermore, what did that woman do to deserve heaven. Again, I'm not saying she necessarily doesn't, but what differentiates her so very much from everyone else since this is a setting where only a select few get into heaven.

She  [the dead spirt] saw him and gasped. “Naked,” she said, staring at him. “Am I in…heaven?”
Should have dressed first. “Not yet.”

Can you really respect Death who goes to work naked?

 

Anya, Minor Goddess of Anarchy

Yes, minor. 

“You are the minor goddess of Anarchy.”
“There’s nothing minor about me.” Minor meant unimportant, and she was just as important as the other, “higher” beings, damn it.

No, minor means she wasn't widely worshipped, which she wasn't. She doesn't have a cult, let alone a widespread one. She has no temples or shrines dedicated to her. She's minor and none of her quibbling is going to change that. Her petulant, foot-stomping tantrums come across like a six-year-old insisting that they're all grown up, because being a child is unimportant. She doesn't hold power in the divine courts of the Greeks, uninvolved in godly politics. She seems to serve no function in the everyday running of the world. I'm not sure you can get more minor than that.

When she’d first come to earth, she hadn’t known how to control her rebellious nature. Gods had been able to protect themselves from it, humans hadn’t. Besides that, she’d been almost…feral from her years in prison. A simple comment from her—you aren’t going to let your brother talk to you like that, are you?—and bloody feuds erupted between clans. An appearance at court—perhaps laughing at the rulers and their policies—and loyal knights attempted to assassinate their king.

Showalter has no idea what anarchy means. When Showalter describes Anya's deep need for anarchy, she describes pyromania and kleptomania. Anya controls her instincts to anarchy and disobedience by stealing, and whilst that is anarchic on a personal level in that she is disobeying the law that tells her not to steal... kleptomania just isn't anarchy. Neither is doodling moustaches on the original Mona Lisa. And really, it's quite unremarkable and dull.

Eventually she’d learned that if she fed her need for disorder with little things—petty theft, white lies and the occasional street fight—huge disasters could be averted.

What immediately came to mind as something she could be doing is feeding her desire for anarchy by inciting rebellion against tyrannical leaders across the world. She would justify to herself that many of the riots she incites may not succeed, but that freedom is a cause worth dying for. She would tell herself that she has a need to incite rebellion so she should at least do it in a place where she knows there is an unjust dictator. She could work ferrying equipment to guerrilla fighters and pass messages. She probably won't get personally invested in any cause too much, but she'd hang around salons  and bitch about dictators, though she wouldn't put much store in political idealism. Would that cut a little close to home for escapism? Perhaps, but it would make her so very much more interesting. That heroine is one I can root for... pit she only exists in my head.

“Once I attended a masked ball and dressed as the devil. Doesn’t sound like a big deal, but the year was eighteen-nineteen and I created quite a stir, let me tell you. When I asked Baron something-or-other to sell me his soul, he tried to stab me with a butter knife.”

It was great when Showalter finally decided to tell us a little of what Anya was doing for the last few millennia, but why she doesn't talk nostalgically about past rebellions? I disbelieve she wasn't there for the French Revolution, wasn't involved in the English Civil War or the Glorious Revolution, didn't care about the leaderless state of medieval Iceland.****

Showalter's blindspot really cripples Anya's potential as a character. She seems so very petty when compared with what she could be doing. Self absorbed and really... well, what claim has she in being a goddess when she isn't doing anything to affect the world? She's hardly the embodiment of a force if she isn't involved in places where anarchy is at its zenith. Surely not all rulers deserve their thrones? And not all laws are just?

 

The Goddess of Lawlessness and Sexual Sin

Dysnomia is really obscure a figure, usually coming in lists of personifications. She is named daughter of Eris...

"But abhorred Strife [Eris] bore painful Toil [Ponos] and Forgetfulness [Lethe] and Famine [Limos] and tearful Sorrows [Algea], Fightings [Hysminai] also, Battles [Machai], Murders [Phonoi], Manslaughters [Androctasiai], Quarrels [Neikea], Lying Words [Pseudea], Disputes [Amphillogiai], Lawlessness [Dysnomia] and Ruin [Ate], all of one nature, and Oath [Horkos] who most troubles men upon earth when anyone willfully swears a false oath." (Hesiod, Theogony 226; as quoted on Greek Mythology Link).

Now, in the context of that list, it is quite easy to see that Dysnomia is not associated with promiscuity. She is lawlessness in the sense of chaos and anarchy. She is lawlessness as in the world turned upside down. The opposite of ordered, stratified Greek society. She is by no means an important figure, but the reduction of her to some slutty goddess (which isn't really true in Hesiod, at least) who sleeps her way around Olympus seems a bit of a slap.

Her kiss had been sinful. Delightfully so. But the woman he’d held in his arms had not seemed evil. Sweet, yes. Amusing, absolutely. And, shockingly enough, vulnerable and wonderfully needy. Of him.

The whole novel is firmly set in the moral framework that views sex as sinful (the standard of romance novels) and it's really quite jarring. Anyone with a passing knowledge of the Greek pantheon would know that they hardly adhere to our sexual standards. A classicist would be able to describe all the nuances of Greek sexuality, but suffice to say it is hardly identical like our own. Read Thornton's Eros: The Myth of Ancient Greek Sexuality, for example. No, we don't know what it was like exactly and there is hardly critical consensus, but they are not exactly like us. If they were, it would be really dull. These are immortal warriors from the dawn of time, can't they at least think a little differently?

Why did he have to look so sexy standing there? The sun was acting like his lover, caressing him, weaving an angelic halo around his dark head. Yes, angelic. He was a fallen angel just then, causing her pulse points to throb and her stomach to quiver.

Even more perplexing is the constant reference to angels. At first the Chronicler simply thought it was metaphorical (which is odd since they don't exist in Greek Mythology) but then references to real angels happened. The reader is never told how they fit into the hierarchy. Presumably with the existence of demons there are also angels, but who are they working for? What purpose do they serve?

 

Anya the Warrior Princess

Showalter allow Anya to fight competently when it comes to the various combat sequences, but why does she dress her in the literary equivalent of cheesecake? I know she's busy bucking trends and expectations, I know she doesn't really need mobility since she can teleport but...

"Despite what you seem to think, I am a powerful being, and I choose whether or not to endanger myself." [...]
Finally, he looked at her—and immediately regretted it. She wore a white gossamer gown with gold threaded throughout, and was even lovelier than he remembered. With the golden glow of moonlight crowning her and emerald plants framing her, she was an ancient queen straight out of a storybook.
The top layers of her pale hair were piled on her head, the rest tumbling down and begging for his touch.

Firstly, he was there in the ancient times and he hardly has time for storybooks, so maybe she should be "an ancient queen like that one he saw in Sparta" or something.

Secondly, her comment that she is a powerful being is really rather undermined with the gossamer gown. Maybe mortal armour is useless for her and she likes the way it looks but Showalter never justifies Anya's battle wear, especially since she doesn't blast them with her lasers, she actually enters the melee.

 

The Canonical Characters were Mean to Me

The Darkest Kiss, as the Anthropologist pointed out, is a lot like Knight of Darkness in that the author is writing about a setting she seems to despise. Kenyon dramatically recast the Arthurian setting to conform to her ideas of manliness and relationships and ideal worlds, keeping almost none of the original concepts.*** Sandra Hill did the same to the Viking era and Showalter is doing the same now with Greek mythology. She uses so very little of the classical Greek religion, the big names of the pantheon barely make an appearance. Her use of Christian heaven and hell points to a world setting badly thought out. When gods from classical myth do turn up, it's only be mean to Anya and call her names in goddess-training-school. Showalter just doesn't seem to care about her source material.

 

Inexplicable Pop Culture References

The Anthropologist wondered about the pop culture references and the tendency for these books to feel dated really quickly. It doesn't make Anya any more connectable. Or likable. Where did she pick up all that slang anyway? Surely hanging around valley girls and chavs is hardly feeding her anarchic desires.

Shortly after, he’d found her a second time and threatened her with the Lords. Now here she and Lucien were, about to go Halo 3 on each other. Score one for Team Cronus.

What does "about to go Halo 3 on each other" even mean? Does it just mean "perpetrate some sort of violence"? Or is the hero going to be permanently stuck in some suit of power armour and aliens will descend from space? It's a shooter game and most of the violence in The Darkest Kiss is even gun violence....

 

To be continued... on the subject of The Darkest Kiss...
How Not to Write Sexual Tension
Distancing the Reader: Revelations of Backstory
Romance Novel Curses
The Other Keepers

 

---

* Perhaps it's publishers wishing to appeal to readers who shy away from reading books out of order, but this decision to not imprint a large number on the spine really does impair one's ability to understand the world setting and actually get into the book. MrsGiggles has complained on many an occasion about the false advertising of non-standalone books. And every dedicated Harry Potter reader is well sick of Rowling's insistence on reiterating the plot of the previous books in her first few chapters.... So, a compromise is need. This the Chronicler well understands. But the point is: two pages of things-you-should-know situated just before the beginning of the story really can't be that much effort to produce. Or maybe they feel it'd scare away readers who want to just leap into the romance and feel uncomfortable with needing to acquire prior knowledge.
But that is the crux of the problem: pretending the book can stand alone when it can't. 

** Why are they called "Lords of the Underworld" anyway? They don't possess an underworld, which presumably is Hades, but this setting has a curiously Christian afterlife. There's a heaven, complete with pearly gates and a sulphurous hell. What is the Underworld, in that case? And why does being a walking prison make them lords of it?

*** To be fair, every era does this, but the Chronicler is often annoyed when a thing goes from being interesting to boring and nonsensical.

**** Some anarchists hold that medieval Iceland is the closest thing to a realised ideal system in their book. A government where there is only one paid official (the lawspeaker) and regular gatherings to settle issues. Minimalist government, eh?

***** I'm not happy about the things that happened in the Cultural Revolution. It was horrific. Thinking about it makes my uncomfortable. But I'm not going to say I believe that everyone who participated in it was evil with a capital "E" and deserving of hell.

The Loinfire Club reads... A Hunger Like No Other

A Hunger Like No Other, by Kresley Cole

The Chronicler remembers all the heated debate back on "Dear Author" over a romance trilogy that ended with vampire hero's death at the hands of the heroine. A romance novel is defined by its happy ending and anything else would result in the readers feeling cheated. Jane wrote: "I kept thinking as Candace Steele engaged in various relationships with men other than Ash that - huh, this doesn’t sound like a romance but I will hang on. After all, the spine of the book says romance. Ballantine says this is a romance. It must be a romance right? I can live through the multiple partners and the separation so long as the hero and heroine end up together."

Well, let's put it this way:

When reading through A Hunger Like No Other, the Chronicler wondered about whether or not it was a romance novel. After all, it was sold as a romance. The quote on the front cover called it one. It even won a RITA, and those are really prestigious, the veritable Oscars of the romance novel world. The spine and the blurb certainly weren't calling the book anything else... Azrael came out and said it and I think he's right: "This book isn't a romance novel. It's just about rape. Seriously. It's crossed the line."

The Chronicler has no problem with people wanting to write about their rape fantasies (or any other, for that matter) as long as they is plenty of warning on the tin and preferably heavily flanked with caveats about how rape really isn't okay in the real world. More importantly, don't try to sell me that fantasy as a romance novel. I don't just feel cheated, I feel concerned about how no one else seems to have noticed this gaping flaw and allowed the book to win a RITA. I wonder if we were even reading the same book.

The Restitution was quite repulsive enough with its heroine waltzing off into her happily ever after with her rapist who never really apologises. It was all part of God's plan that she suffer through her rape to save that man's black, black soul and wasn't it worth it in the end? He could have raped her hundreds of times when he was holding her captive and he only raped her one, wasn't that nice of him?

But really, this pales in comparison. If only because The Restitution actually acknowledges that rape is quite a traumatic thing for a woman.

Now, admittedly, the Loinfire Club throws around the word "rape", quite a bit, and for that we know we're bad people. Often the situation described is more in the realms of dubious consent and sexual harassment, but Kresley Cole's A Hunger Like No Other really defies all expectations and previous experiences. This isn't a forced seduction or a punishing kiss... 

At the point where we put down the novel, several chapters into the book, the werewolf hero has broken free of his fiery prison under Paris, forced himself onto the heroine. He rips her blouse off in the middle of Paris. He then forces her to show him the way to her place and asks her to clean herself. When she refuses, he strips her naked, gropes her in the shower, fingers her and, deciding against ripping her open with his massive cock, relents and asks her to use her hands instead. He toys with her throughout the night, allowing her to think she's managing to escape but catching her the last minute with superhuman strength. He wakes her up by going down on her and then forces her to call her aunts and tell them she'll be away for a while. He listens in, worried that she might tell them to descend with their supernatural powers, but the good little heroine doesn't and they set off to Scotland.

Now, all this happens without werewolf hero asking for consent of any form or at least informing Emma that she's his soulmate and that fate has willed it they be together forever and ever. Emma alternates between being confused, aroused and scared. I am well aware that Mr-Rapist-hero has been imprisoned for a hundred and fifty years in a fiery hell and, presumably, chaste for every minute of it. I am also aware that he hates vampires and would be killing Emma if she didn't smell of true love... but none of this really seems to justify his actions even a little bit. The only way you could possibly believe frustration justifies rape is if you believe male lust is this overpowering, uncontrollable drive that strips they of rational thought, morality and human empathy. And I don't believe that. Seriously. 

I don't care that he's enraged about her being a vampire and that he's been tortured by vampires for centuries. That doesn't justify rape. That especially doesn't justify him thinking to himself that Fate is chaining Emma to him forevermore with the whole soulmate business so that he can take out his rage over being tortured on her. I don't care that he's attractive or that she's a bit aroused -attractiveness isn't a free pass and arousal is certainly not consent. I don't care that they're predestined mates, since funnily enough, rape can happen within marriages. I don't care that he doesn't quite bring himself to penetrate her vaginally; it's hardly any mercy on his part. I don't care that Socrates thinks there's a beast in the best of us. It's really, really no excuse. I don't care that he's surprisingly gentle, it's still no substitute for consent.

That we aren't give any cultural touchstone of any sort ("Werewolf chicks dig rape", "where I come from, this is how you say hi")  makes it even more difficult to see any reason to justify the rapist-hero's behaviour. It's not that cultural upbringing justifies this behaviour, but that the author seems to not feel it necessary, that the reader would simply sympathise with the lying, manipulative sex offender.

At no point in the first few chapters is the heroine in control of her situation. At no point was she consenting to all the sexual contact the hero inflicted on her. Really, this point is becoming laboured, so I'll move onto the whole abduction business. He takes over her life, steals her money and her credit card. He decides where they're going and what they're doing. He decides how she'll dress, what underwear she'll wear and watches as she changes. He listens in on her conversations, threatens her with rape, torture and death.... 

It is also baffling how baffled the heroine is. He told her repeatedly and without ambiguity that he intends to rape her. Maybe she's so sheltered she's never read the odd case of woman-kept-in-basement-and-repeatedly-raped-etc in the newspapers. Maybe its his Scottish accent obscuring his meaning.

Oh, and a real half-valkyrie would have castrated him by now.

(Rant out of system now. It may be a little while before the Chronicler manages to face Cole's again and post the full write-up...)

The Loinfire Club doesn't read.... Twilight

Twilight, by Stephanie Meyer

When 17 year old Isabella Swan moves to Forks, Washington to live with her father she expects that her new life will be as dull as the town. But in spite of her awkward manner and low expectations, she finds that her new classmates are drawn to this pale, dark-haired new girl in town. But not, it seems, the Cullen family. These five adopted brothers and sisters obviously prefer their own company and will make no exception for Bella. Bella is convinced that Edward Cullen in particular hates her, but she feels a strange attraction to him, although his hostility makes her feel almost physically ill. He seems determined to push her away ? until, that is, he saves her life from an out of control car. Bella will soon discover that there is a very good reason for Edward's coldness. He, and his family, are vampires ? and he knows how dangerous it is for others to get too close. 

The Chronicler feels she really needs to get some more horrible books to bash, or perhaps better books to gush over. Mediocrity is really quite difficult comment on and even more difficult to read. After a while the mind numbs to the dull prose and what nuggets of interest are only interesting in comparison.

Mrs Giggles wrote that Stephanie Meyer created "the most potent kind of pornography for teenage girls in Twilight - the Mary Sue epic love story." And, preamble aside, the Chronicler maintains that this assessment is the most succinct, witty and accurate assessment of Twilight possible and that anything she can add is really just flogging a dead pony. Elizabeth Hand dissects all four books with great wit and brevity... But the rambling habit never stopped me. Neither will the fact that Twilight has already received numerous awards (The 

Anthropologist remarked that she never heard anyone scream "Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year" with that much horror).

Incidentally, the cover of Twilight is really pretty. Proverbs and pronouncements aside, it was in fact the reason why The Chronicler owns a copy of the book. That and there is something compelling about the blurb:

About three things I was absolutely positive. First, Edward was a vampire. Second, there was part of him — and I didn't know how potent that part might be — that thirsted for my blood. And third, I was unconditionally and irrevocably in love with him.

Of course, when you think about it harder there are holes to pick at and the promise of unconditional love is all well and good in concept, in quotes, but it is often makes for a perplexing – if not alienating – read. Dark, twisted obsession makes for a fascinating read, but the trap of romanticising it so often ensnares the author and the reader is presented a picture of dubious relationship practices as an ideal rather than a compelling perversion.

Isabella "Bella" Swan moves into Forks, which we are assured to be the most damp and overcast little town in all of America, and meets Edward Cullen, the sparkliest, most beautiful vampire ever. In the last quarter or so of the book, something resembling a plot kicks in and some vampire by the name of James decides he wants to hunt Bella for sport, but that is really inconsequential to the True Love that exists between Bella and Edward.

The opening chapters are interminable and shows again all the weaknesses of a first person narrative.* Meyer has an eye for incidental detail and one is torn from seeing it as clutter and seeing it as building a believable – if dull – character. Bella calls her father "Charlie" and her mother "Reneé". The Anthropologist theorises latent and repressed resentment or that they're "hip" parents who insist on being called their first names. However, Bella calls them "Mom" and "Dad" in speech and emails thus the "voice" of her narrative seems somehow... off.

Bella's description of her new truck makes me wonder if she's aware that the indomitable Toyota Pickup is foreign:

Plus, it was one of those solid iron affairs that never gets damaged — the kind you see at the scene of an accident, paint unscratched, surrounded by the pieces of the foreign car it had destroyed.

But much of Twilight shows a great blind spot in general knowledge, such as when Edward tells Bella that his favourite blood is that of a mountain lion and "Grizzly [Bear] is Emmett's favourite." He adds:

We have to be careful not to impact the environment with injudicious hunting. We try to focus on areas with an overpopulation of predators.

The Balance, ever the voice of reason and conservation biology, notes that this would mean nowhere. Whilst neither the grizzly bear nor the mountain lion is currently listed under "threatened" by the World Conservation Union, both populations are somewhat precarious. "Near threatened" is hardly a green light for vampires to start wrestling down mountain lions and draining them of blood.

But maybe the world of Twilight is completely different from our own when it comes to this and has a real problem with predator overpopulation...

The Anthropologist notes that Meyer seems to recycle common vampire tropes by substituting in less famous names in hopes that this obvious filing off of the serial numbers would give the impression of an original idea. Instead of Navajo skin-walker werewolves, she has them as Quileute. Instead of Michelangelo and Raphael Sanzio being inspired by Vampires to paint, it's Francesco Solimena, also of the Italian Renaissance. The new names doesn't make it feel more fresh or original.

Meyer struggles with creating the obliviously beautiful heroine – the ugly girl who is simple a pretty girl with glasses:

I should be tan, sporty, blond — a volleyball player, or a cheerleader, perhaps — all the things that go with living in the valley of the sun.

Instead, I was ivory-skinned, without even the excuse of blue eyes or red hair, despite the constant sunshine. I had always been slender, but soft somehow, obviously not an athlete. 

"Ivory-skinned" is in no way a derogatory descriptor. Neither is a soft slenderness. In fact, all one can get from the passage is that she is conventionally attractive. She tells us both her height (5' 4") and weight (110lbs), conveniently allowing us to work out her Body Mass Index, which we, of course, proceeded to do. (The Anthropologist was rather gleeful about this since she'd never been given the information to do this to a romance novel heroine before.)

It rather difficult to actually give Bella's claims of being an unpopular outcast any credence. She soon has a plethora of male admirers and multiple female friends (most of whom are nice but mildly jealous of her).

On the other hand, it is perhaps quite easy to see why she hadn't many friends back in Phoenix as she goes through her first day making unsympathetic snap judgements on the people who are nice to her:

When the bell rang, a nasal buzzing sound, a gangly boy with skin problems and hair black as an oil slick leaned across the aisle to talk to me.

"You're Isabella Swan, aren't you?" He looked like the overly helpful, chess club type.

It's not even that I don't like snarky people, but Bella's brand of sarcasm comes across as unpleasant, borderline misanthropic and not particularly incisive (or funny, for that matter). She is also utterly oblivious to the possibility that she may be doing something wrong in her inability to communicate and sympathise with her peers.

(Incidentally, we never do discover whether or not "Chess Club Eric" is actually member of any chess club – or if there is a chess club at this school – he is given this label by Bella and it is used forevermore.)

Meyer claims that Bella's sudden surge in popularity in Forks high school is based in part on her own ugly-duckling-now-swan university experience. Of course, there is quite a big difference between switching from one high school to another and from high school to university. Usually, the case of "stock surge," as Meyer put it, is caused by there simply being more people at college and exposure to a greater number of people. The Anthropologist also quips that Meyer's anecdote is probably coloured by the fact that she attended Brigham Young University, where the beauty is measured by willingness to become a happy housewife. (The Anthropologist would like to add that she was being very snarky at this point and doesn't mean it literally.)

Probable or not, it's immensely hard to sympathise with the self-proclaimed unattractive girl who finds herself being asked by three (not including the hero) boys to the "girls' choice spring dance." Which is really reason enough to reject them since they blatantly fail to grasp simple concepts (and will no doubt have trouble with concepts like "consent" later on in the evening.) Bella takes her new friends and admirers very much for granted. She doesn't even seem to care much about them and they start blurring together into this faceless, chattering mass, which really doesn't recommend the character to me.

The same applies to most of Twilight, there is a great distance between the showing and the telling. As readers, we're told repeatedly that Bella is clumsy to the point of endangering herself, yet we little evidence of this in her actions. I understand the need for comic hyperbole, but the "joke" of Bella's clumsiness needs to be reinforced with some actual correlation with reality. I don't know, she could get hit by a volleyball more. Or walk into a lamppost whilst reading. We're told Bella is bookish, yet she is rarely shown reading and it seems never to surface in her conversation – surely any seventeen-year-old who has wild imagination and a bookish way can come up with something more creative than "Bruce Wayne and Peter Parker" in an entire month. For that matter, "Bruce Wayne" is a stupid explanation for Edward's supernatural abilities since Batman has none; he's just really, really rich. 

I had decided to read Wuthering Heights — the novel we were currently studying in English — yet again for the fun of it...

I know I've odd opinions about the Brontës, but who reads Wuthering Heights "for the fun of it"? It's an immensely emotionally draining book. (Unless, of course, you find it alienating, messy and dull, which is another popular opinion.) It's really quite dark and unlike, say, Jane Eyre, it's quite difficult to overlook the dark bits – the murderous hero, the unapologetically selfish heroine... But perhaps this attitude to the events of Wuthering Heights will explain her later reaction to Edward's vampirism.

 

But yes, the vampires of Twilight, the main attraction... they are quite possible the least subtle ones this side of serious literature. They are aloof, never talk to any of the students and sit by themselves in their little huddle in the cafeteria:

[They] were all devastatingly, inhumanly beautiful. They were faces you never expected to see except perhaps on the airbrushed pages of a fashion magazine. Or painted by an old master as the face of an angel.

(At this point, the Chronicler hastens to add that she clearly doesn't mean any of the medieval masters...)

Not only that, but they all have:

dark shadows under those eyes —purplish, bruiselike shadows. As if they were all suffering from a sleepless night, or almost done recovering from a broken nose.

...which you'd think would crimp their perfect, perfect beauty. It's explicitly describes as being more like an injury rather than overly enthusiastic eye-shadow application. But clearly Bella (or Meyer) is of the opinion that abuse victims are hot.

The deathly pale complexion, unearthly beauty (despite adopted) and uniformly bruised eyes aside, they also don't eat. They all sit there with their food in front them, looking at nothing in particular ("away from each other, away from the other students, away from anything in particular as far as I could tell") and not eating. They then proceed to throw away their uneaten food. And this happens, we could but assume, every day. Wasting the food aside, it seems inane that no one has noticed this. Especially since I'm sure anorexia is quite a problem in high schools (one that is looked out for) and the girls look like "Sports Illustrated" models, which implies underweight to me.

I hope you're getting a full image here, dear reader: inhumanly beautiful, deathly pale clique with uniformly bruised eyes sit together, not looking at anything, not eating, every lunch time at the cafeteria. I wouldn't suspect vampires, but cult would be high on the suspicions list.

Bella and Edward stare at each other, a lot. Edward stares at her with a "hostile, furious" expression on his face. And she shies away from his gaze, but stare at him when he's not looking. This game of stares goes on for far, far too long. The blurb makes no secret of Bella and Edward's eventual relationship so it really begs the question why it can't cut to the chase, especially when the misunderstandings and double-meaning really gets on my nerves. 

Edward heavy-handedly hints at how very dangerous he is and the reader is in on the fact that he's a vampire, but Bella isn't and... suffice to say, the Belief Turnstile is badly handled. It's a very, very long time before Bella finds out that Edward's a vampire and the whole sequence lacks suspense (since the reader already knows he's a vampire and is impatient for the revelation) and momentum, let alone actual believability. Bella hears about vampires from Jacob Black, a family friend and then ends up googling it. She then ponders if Edward could be. Later, he confirms this... it's just dull. And never does she actually feel threatened by him.

Of course, it's never clear what Bella's worldview was, pre-vampires. She swallows the website wholesale and moves on to speculate whether the Cullens were vampires. She doesn't need to, well, fit them into an emerging picture of the world she lives in. If someone were to prove to me that vampires exist, then the next question is whether or not other folkloric creatures exist and which versions of the folklores are most accurate. Then is the question where they fit in the universe: Is there a heaven and a hell? Do we have souls or not? Etc, etc...

Bella's just incredibly uncurious. She asks Edward about popular culture vampires, but neglects to ask him about the three pages of Wikipedia reading she did.

I felt a spasm of fear at his words, and the abrupt memory of his violent black glare that first day… but the overwhelming sense of safety I felt in his presence stifled it.

Their relationship is described with self-contradicting hyperbole and never does the reader glimpse the "heart" of the relationship, how the two characters actually function together as a couple. Bella falls in love with him without really interacting with him in any meaningful way beyond stares (and they're not even meaningful stares, the sort the allegedly pierce the heart and make one feel truly understood) and a few words of cryptic conversation. We never find out the contents of her Edward-filled dreams, since she doesn't really know enough of his personality to extrapolate what interacting with him would be like (unlike he, who was probably busy listening in on every conversation she has via mind-reading). Besides his statuesque beauty – literally, actually, since vampire skin resembles marble in its texture and hardness – he seems to have little to recommend him.

The most remarkable conversation is this one, early in their relationship:

I couldn't remember the last time I'd talked so much. More often than not, I felt selfconscious, certain I must be boring him. But the absolute absorption of his face, and his never-ending stream of questions, compelled me to continue. Mostly his questions were easy, only a very few triggering my easy blushes. But when I did flush, it brought on a whole new round of questions. 

He asks her questions like "What music is in your CD player right now?" and what her favourite gemstone/flower/colour/book/movie is. It 's even likened in the book to psychoanalysis. It's baffling, since most hold these topics to be conversation starters, where there is an exchange of opinion and discussion as opposed to a one-sided interrogation. One could read this as how a vampire (due to being dead) is utterly unable to really experience real preference and opinion, thus is leeching of her vivid and exciting life experience, but it's not really the way it's presented to one. Plus, Edward does actually have opinions and is functionally the same as a normal human.

The Anthropologist posits that it's because the teenage female desires a teenage boy who inundate them all the questions like those on facebook and myspace, desiring to know all those pointless preferences like a "which angel are you?" quiz, because that is their standard of meaningful correspondence.

 

Meyer uses Edward's bloodlust as an odd metaphor for sexual desire – Edward's sexual desire is equated to his desire to drink (and kill) Bella – which gives the whole book an odd allegorical side, which Meyer explicitly point to. But it's a tightly-controlled-yet-overpowering desire which Bella can never understand, neither does she feel anything akin to it – really quite repulsive, outdated sexual politics, in my opinion, but it's found in trace quantities in at least half the romance novels on the market, so I'll not harp on that too much. Elizabeth Hand finds in Meyer "unrequited female erotic yearning", but it's hardly the case. There's nothing even vaguely erotic about Bella's yearning. She's a good girl. Her admiration of Edward, though isn't physical – or so she insists. It's what's behind the face, she tells her friend, she's fascinated by the idea of a redeeming monster.

But Bella (unlike Jane Eyre, for example) isn't the agent of his redemption, she's remarkably passive throughout the story. Edward is already well on the road to redemption (set on by Dr. Cullen) when he meets her. Pillywiggin goes as far as calling her the "meatbag" Edward wheels about the place and refuses to let talk. Edward notes that he feels the most "human" when around her, but it's never really explained what that means.

(Actually, Dr. Cullen's backstory is really odd. It takes him, literally, months to develop the philosophy to drink animal blood instead of human. Seriously. How thick is this founding father of vampire "vegetarianism"? In addition, after a few centuries of self-control, he manages to resist bloodlust so much he can work in a hospital.)

Still, telling her that she must stay absolutely still when he kisses her, or else, he'll accidentally kill her, seems a bit much.

There really was no excuse for my behaviour. Obviously I knew better by now. And yet I couldn't seem to stop from reacting exactly as I had the first time. Instead of keeping safely motionless, my arms reached up to twine tightly around his neck, and I was suddenly welded to his stone figure

Edward's declarations of his immense skull-crushing strength is weird:

"If I was too hasty… if for one second I wasn't paying enough attention, I could reach out, meaning to touch your face, and crush your skull by mistake. You don't realize how incredibly breakable you are. I can never, never afford to lose any kind of control when I'm with you."

With that kind of strength... well, surely he'd be accidentally putting holes into walls, breaking doorbells, stamping through floors... telephones must be a nightmare as he accidentally punches them apart with his fingers. But of course, this sort of strength only applies when with Bella (or alternatively, Bella is just made of tofu).

Speaking of kisses, the book also boasts of what Pillywiggen has branded the most unsexy kiss she's ever read:

He seemed unaware of his watching family as he pulled my face to his, lifting my feet off the floor. For the shortest second, his lips were icy and hard against mine. Then it was over. He set me down, still holding my face, his glorious eyes burning into mine.

Bella is rather frail, she faints at blood (especially inconvenient when dating a vampire) and later faints at Edward's kisses. She has a special scent that only Edward can smell (no, I don't know why, or how he knows this) though she is still immensely attractive:

"If you didn't smell so appallingly luscious, he might not have bothered." [...]

"I thought… I didn't smell the same to the others… as I do to you," I said hesitantly.

"You don't. But that doesn't mean that you aren't still a temptation to every one of them. If you had appealed to the tracker — or any of them — the same way you appeal to me, it would have meant a fight right there."

After Bella is told that she is to inform her father that she's going out with Edward (so that he has an incentive to bring her back), she promptly decides to not do so, since if Edward succumbs to bloodlust and kills her, she doesn't want to get him into trouble.

It's probably common knowledge by now and barely worth mocking, but Meyer's vampires literally sparkle:

His skin, white despite the faint flush from yesterday's hunting trip, literally sparkled, like thousands of tiny diamonds were embedded in the surface. He lay perfectly still in the grass, his shirt open over his sculpted, incandescent chest, his scintillating arms bare.

The Anthropologist has much snark concerning how this conforms to teenage female aesthetics, but it's really getting too easy...

 

There is something compelling about the lion-in-love-with-the-lamb trope, and Meyer does milk it for all its worth, but she doesn't let the story darken or deepen. Edward really isn't a very objectionable vampire. Vampires being harmed by holy water and daylight reinforces as metaphysical acknowledgement of their inhuman, inherently diabolical nature. By getting rid most of the traditional vampiric trappings, Meyer's vampires just aren't very monstrous. Or scary. 

There is nothing that isn't immediately forgiven by Bella. She isn't repulsed by the fact he doesn't drink blood, or that he has killed numerous people (admittedly serial killers, rapists and muggers) in the past in order to drink their blood. Her acceptance of him, this unconditional love, doesn't seem tested by his revelations. She takes it all in her stride. Monstrous, Byronic heroes work only if the heroine, the author, the reader, the rest of the cast, all acknowledge that he's actually monstrous.

It's telling, perhaps, in the phrasing of how Meyer says that Edward is based on Jane Eyre's Edward Rochester, because both "see themselves as 'monsters.'" It's the self-perception as monstrous, but Meyer, however sees Edward as a gentlemen, full of "olde-worlde charm." Of course, the Chronicler often finds that the world seems to reading a different book than her. Rochester is monstrous, in many ways. He was ready to commit bigamy (no small sin in Victorian England), he's got his wife locked up in his attic, madness aside, he's not really giving her any decent care or treatment. He also had mistresses (also no small sin in Victorian England). Jane is drawn to him, but she cannot forgive him and cannot marry him, so she runs away from temptation. But the point is, Rochester is a man weighed down by his past inhabiting a world that acknowledges his sinfulness. He's genuinely haunted by that past. Edward Cullen, on the other hand, flits about his teenage classroom. His decade of murdering murderers is brought up only once and never again, not even by Bella (seriously, that more than half her age spent drinking blood). Bella's absolute faith in Edward to control himself, to not kill her simply adds her mind-numbing naiveté and solidifies Edward as "just misunderstood."

Perhaps it's because he's so very well-controlled that Edward comes across as an automaton. Meyer speaks of "sacrifice" and she relates it to her college experience at Brigham Young University... It's as though she's not really aware that when most people write about "sacrifices" made for love, they don't mean "no sex before marriage" or "no alcohol at college." They usually mean things grander, more epic, shall we say. That Edward's sexual/bloodlust struggle is rather too dull to be placed at the fore of the book... well, we know he's not going to succumb. Bella's hardly going to die by his hand.... So where's the tension?  Bella doesn't have graphic fantasies of him gnawing her neck off and doesn't really actively tempt him beyond just existing.

Meyer also notes in the same interview that "Edward goes to great lengths so nothing bad happens to Bella, she is cared for so much. A lot of the book's appeal is the thought of being loved to that extent [...] There has been some antagonism from men about Edward. They are jealous because they don't want to try that hard."

Of course men don't want to try that hard. And no man should. It's creepy. Edward seems to do nothing else but stalk her (and hunt for food). He spends all his sleepless nights sneaking into Bella's room and watching her sleep, seemingly immune to boredom. (Pillywiggin theorises that Bella's a one-woman radio station in her range of sleep-talking, but I doubt that's what Meyer has in mind.) He stalks her, literally following her about and finding out where is by reading the thoughts of those around her. And this is all before they actually get together and declare their love and all that.

Yes, Edward can hear the thoughts of everyone around him (except for Bella) and has no qualms eavesdropping on her conversations with other friends and acquaintances. Bella simply cannot talk to anyone about him, cannot confide in anyone without him finding out. It's creepily invasive.  Worse, Bella doesn't have a problem with this. She doesn't feel as though her privacy was invaded, neither does she discourage him doing so beyond a jokey reprimand and she also doesn't feel that perhaps her friends wouldn't want creepy century-old vampire crawling all over their thoughts, making her come across as thoughtless and sociopathic. 

At the end of the day, Edward looks seventeen, but why is he condemning himself to year after year of high school education? This is never elucidated in the book, but as Mrs Giggles points out, "I can only shudder as I imagine how vapid Edward must be to enjoy being a permanent teenage kid." But he doesn't act like a seventeen-year-old. Hand describes him as "an obsessively controlling adult male," more father than boyfriend, and she's not far off the mark.

"You are my life. You're the only thing it would hurt me to lose."

I know, you're seventeen and you've no idea what to do with the rest of your life yet. But to anchor your entire existence on someone else is creepy and unhealthy. Has she not thought of her parents, her friends, her studies. Has no other hobbies that would be inconvenienced due to her vampirism? Perhaps it's because Meyer's so very de-fanged her vampires there's really not much choice. Being a vampire is just better. Eternal youth, supernatural strength, agility, perception and beauty.... There simply aren't any downsides. White Wolf's vampires, for example, have no creativity and all that they feel and create is merely a reflection of their alive years. Admittedly it's ridiculously angsty, but at least, it's a tangible downside. "I want to be a great artist, but I also love you, dear vampire" is a reasonable (if angsty) plot.

In conclusion, it's bad. And boring. Bella is infantile, passive and spineless. Edward is annoying, holier-than-thou and inhuman. As a bonus it also contains ideas about sex and relationships that I'd rather teenage girls didn't make into the stuff of their daydreams.

 

---

* A first person narrator is limited to narrating what he or she sees. It is through this character's eyes that the reader perceives the world – a great asset when the character is interesting and has an idiosyncratic world view, but also an immense weakness when the author imperfectly hides behind this persona and starts puppeting characters about or worse, when unintentional voyeurism, sadism or masochism is created through lingering descriptions of things.

Cult of the Butcher God

Along time ago, before the forming of the Loinfire Club, when the Chronicler wrote as an ambiguously-gendered poster known as "Theo", there was a theory... The Chronicler is still so very fond of it that she wants to share it yet again as she opens the new chapter of Brisingr.

We were reading Eragon, late one night, after enduring the horror that is the film (very pretty, though) and came up with the following theory, which neatly explains the some of the silly economics ofEragon and what happened to the gods of Alagaesia (as Eragon does repeatedly mention the existence of nonspecific deities.)

A Butcher requires 1200 people
A Blacksmith requires 1500 people 
A Healer requires 1700 people
A Carpenter 550 people
A Tanner 2000 people
From: Medieval Demographics Made Easy

Yet Carvahall has but a population of 300...

The Cult of the Butcher God

The Humans of Alagaesia worship certain gods. One of the most important ones is The Butcher God. He has certain strictures, of which one can deduce by reading the book:

1) Thou shalt eat much meat; thou shalt not survive without eating meat.

This can be seen in Eragon and his family's need for meat to make it through the winter. Despite owning a farm and all its produce, they still need more meat from hunting and eat chicken for breakfast whilst their on the verge of not making it through the winter. Whatever happened to porridge? Or the eggs of the chickens. Or the milk from the cows.

This can also be seen in Eragon's raid of the Butcher when he runs away from Carvahall. He cares nothing for bread or other staple foodstuffs that don't rot in a day. He must have meat.

This also explains why Garrow's farm has such ridiculously small amounts of produce, yet still has excess to be sold off at Carvahall. They scorn the eating of vegetables. (They finished harvesting in about a day.)

2) The priests of the Butcher God shall be known as Butchers. There shalt be one in every settlement and they shalt be Clean.

This neatly explains why there is a butcher in Carvahall, when there is no need for one in a small farming settlement, where everyone can do their own butchering and own their own animals.

3) Thou shalt not kill your own animals. Take thou animals to the butcher so that they may be prepared in the Holy Way. Thou shalt then buy back thou meat.

This explains why the butcher, Sloan, has business. This explains why he has a ready stock of meat and even why he still has a stock of fresh prime cut meat to fill up Eragon's backpack when Horst demanded it, instead of having sold it all during the day.

4) Thou shalt cast aside the cheap cuts as they are unworthy of the Butcher God. Thou shalt eat only prime rump steak and the other good cuts of meat. Not even the dogs are fit to consume the unworthy meat.

It is obvious that everyone, including Horst, Garrow and Eragon, are devout worshippers of the Butcher God. Their concern over meat and their need for it thoughout the books can be seen.

This also explains the consumption of chicken for breakfast and Eragon's fondness of the simple fare of a hunk of meat boiled in salty water. This explains why Garrow isn't carefully boiling oxtails and offal for meaty stock for use in cooking.

5) Fish is not a Meat. Thou shalt not eat Fish instead of Meat.

This explains the curious lack of fishing near the sea or the enormous lakes (more on that later) of Alagaesia. They just don't need it. No one eats fish at any point, only ever cheese, meat or bread.

The second god of Alagaesia is the Smith God. These are his strictures:

1) Priests of the Smith God shalt be smiths. Only they shalt fix and make metal goods. For only they know the holy way.

Explains why every single village has its own smith and why Roran needs to take his chisel into Carvahall to get fixed. Of course, this is discounting the other meaning of chisel-fixing.

2) Thou shalt always take at least two apprentices.

Because one just isn't good enough.

Neatly explains why Horst needs two apprentices when he's working in one small village in the middle of nowhere, with nary a long distance journey horse in sight.

3) All thou horses shalt be shoed.

Gives Horst the business he needs when farm horses often don't need the shoeing due to only ever plodding on soft soil.

4) Thou must be a Master Smith to create complex machinery.

Explains why Horst is consulted for those damn mill parts. It's not a matter of skill, but of religious status. And that's never logical, is it?

5) All things shalt be forged and wrought. Even if they really shouldn't. Thou shalt love all things made of shiny metal. All things of worth shall resemble metals. Liquid and the appearance of liquid makes things more Holy.

This explains the poor starving family can spend money on trinkets, as Garrow repeatly produces not very much money from his pocket and tells Roran to spend it on a trinket. It also explains how the elf's helmet in the prologue is "wrought" out of amber and gold, wrought being a very specific action of folding and beating metal. Nigh impossible with something as soft as gold and as brittle as amber.

This also explains Chris' habit of describing things as "wrought" and "forged" out of something when its a mind-bogglingly stupid mixed metaphor that just doesn't work. Also, it explains Chris' other annoying habit of refering to things resembling liquid metals and gems. "Molten copper", "liquid diamond", "liquid silver"... etc...

This explains why Chris spends more time describing the sword (Ra'zac) than Eragon's angst about his dying uncle or the sheer horror of the death-strewn village. He spends far more time gazing on the arrows and spears.

6) Gold is the most Holy of all metals. All things of Importance shall be made of its brilliance. Next most holy is silver.

Explains why Eragon's armour is made out of gold, the very soft and heavy metal that is useless as practical armour. The helmet of gold in the prologue and assorted other inappropriate objects made from this metal.

There is also the Judgement God, who decides what is good and evil. He is probably often depicted playing chess, with black and white pieces. His strictures are as follows:

1) All Good things shalt be beautiful, shiny and white. All Evil things shalt be black, ugly and smelly.

This explains how Arya can smell of pine trees after months of imprisonment with the Urgals, who smell of fetid flesh.

This also explains the appearance and colour of everything in the book, such as the black arrows of the Urgals vs the swan-feather-fletched arrows of the elves. This explains the white baby on a spear and the black crow about to eat it.

2) Killing is neither good nor evil. If you are good, it is good to kill evil things and evil to kill good things. If you are evil, it is evil to kill both good and evil things.

The elves are fervent worshippers of the Judgment god. His duality can be seen rather prominently in their descriptions. They kill Urgals and other evil characters without reservation. They mutilate enemy corpses and kill envoys, and it's all okay, because they're Good and the enemy is Evil.

Finally, there is the Merchant God. He is less widely worshipped, but we can detect his cult in the major trading cities.

1) Taxes are Evil as they Oppress trade.

This explains why the Empire of Galbatorix is evil, despite having no other obvious act of oppression. Taxes are evil in the eyes of the Merchant God, and that is why the Empire must be deposed.

2)Thou shalt keep records of All thou transactions on Parchment.

This explains why everything is written on parchment instead of paper. (Parchment being expensive things made out of animal skins and paper being the cheaper stuff made out of wood chips and bark.) This also explains why records have been kept about the selling of Acid-Oil to the Ra'zac, which really has no reason to be on records anywhere. Empire owned ships, shipping to locations of the super-secret hideout of the Ra'zac shouldn't really leave a paper trail, yet it does.

Cult of the Farmer God

Thus are the strictures of the Farmer God:

1) All farms must be as far from cities as possible, so as not to be tainted by their civillisation.

Explains why there appear to be no villages or farmhouses or fields near cities. It also explains why Carvahall, little village at the edge of the great and glorious Empire, is featured on the map of it. It is a farming village furthest away from the cities, therefore it is becomes a site of pilgrimage and holy importance. Hence all the traders travelling there every year, why else would they visit? After all, villagers from a community with its own smith and tanner - thereby usurping all possible business from visiting tinkers - should be travelling to a market town yearly instead.

It also explains why Garrow's farm is a whole ten miles away from Carvahall for no real reason.

2)Thou shallt sell your Produce to the first trader thou meetest who will buy it. Thou shalt not hold out for a better deal.

It explains why Garrow sells his produce to random traders instead of travelling to a market town where he would set his own price.

It also explains why Eragon only manages to sell his horse for "a few coins", when it should be worth quite a lot of money, as horses are. (Horses are worth something in the ball-part of 300-600g of silver.)

3) Thou must pick a variety of crops on the same day. Thou shalt pick from each of your crops on each day of the harvest, for all are equal in the Eyes of the Farmer God. And thou shalt store it in a Holy Place.

Explains why Garrow and his helpers pick a little bit of everything: "last of the barley [...] prickly-vined squash, the rutabagas, beets, peas, turnips, and beans" (p.21, Eragon, hardback) all on one day. They should have more produce than that, so, if we give them the benefit of the doubt, they're using some mighty interesting picking tecniques.

4) All produce of the farm is holy in the eyes of the Farmer God and must be preserved for as long as possible. Eat of cheese and bread, the holiest product of the Farm.

This is why they carefully preserve everything for no reason and then neglect to eat it at any point. Or even think about eating it.

This explains why they only ever eat bread and/or cheese, when the characters of Eragon are not hunting. They do occassionally eat porridge or other foodstuffs, like that cherry pie of Eragon's (cherry pie is holy because it contains preserved cherries), but mostly, it's just bread and cheese.

It also explains why Eragon's bread can last over two weeks in the desert.

This also explains why Eragon feels the need to preserve Brom's body. And where Eragon has seen a mummy before (cf. the nitpick of Garrow's description). The Farmer God acts as the God of Death, or at least, death rites, in the bizarre culture of Alagaesia.

5) Thou shalt not improve thou fields with fertilliser or irrigation or any such other unnatural acts.

This explains why there is so much dry grass around Carvahall which should be irrigated and fertillised into good farmland and thus producing amounts which could last them through winter without supplementing. Hence also Garrow and other farmers not needing to have a mixed farm (the most logical sort of farm to have in case crops or animals of one variety fail). Of course, we can assume this is a world where crop rotation hasn't been invented yet.

Not wanting fertilliser would mean not needing to keep animals for that ever useful byproduct.