Have I written this weekend? I have not. OTOH, I slept until 9am this morning, so that was good. Some thoughts on a couple of June books.
(1)
Patience, by John Coates (Persephone)
Patience is one of those novels that I go to just to check something, or read a couple of pages, and then end up staying up late reading the whole thing, not necessarily in the right order. Last month, that was Maeve Binchy's
Circle of Friends, this week it was
Patience, which is a book that reaches levels of charm and sheer niceness that it is probably enchanted, but which has a core of steel. It's not simply escapist froth (not that there isn't a place for escapist froth, says this Georgette Heyer and Wodehouse reader), at the heart of it are real social issues that the author takes seriously, namely that being trapped in a marriage with shit sex because no one ever told you there was an alternative, is a feminist issue.
The titular Patience Gathorne-Galley is a 1950, upper middle-class mother of three in her late-twenties, married to the deeply conventional Edward to whom she is the perfect submissive wife, with the exception that her three children so far have disappointingly been daughters. Then one day her skin-crawlingly ghastly ultra-Catholic brother comes and tells her that Edward is having an affair and thus committing Sin. Which Patience takes with surprising equanimity - until she learns that far more complicated than having a present mistress, Edward has a former wife living, and to top it all off, Patience herself has suddenly fallen in love with someone else and discovered, as seven years of marriage hasn't taught her, about the existence of orgasms.* What follows is the gentle farce of the love-and-anger-fuelled Patience deciding to stop being a submissive wife and be selfish for a bit and rearrange her life in a way that involves much more love and sex, while remaining a goodish Catholic. Patience is lovely and funny and innocent discovering things about the world rather late and annoyed about it, but a fundamentally kind person, her lover out of his depth but equally head over heals, and she also has a nice lawyer brother-in-law to balance the terribly accurate portraits of her brother and husband. Some of the darlings and dears get a bit cloying at times, that's the price of the 1950s. Alas, there is very little about Coates himself on the internet.
(2)
Spinning Silver, by Naomi Novik
Very explicitly a novel for all of us who read Rumpelstiltskin as a child and thought "But she owes him the deal, that isn't fair!" The heroine Miryem is the daughter of an unsuccessful moneylender, who is a good father in other respects, but unfortunately entirely lacking in aptitude for his job and thus unable to collect the debts of his wife's dowry that he's given away, in the face of unfriendly villagers. So Miryem decides she'll have to it herself and proves rather better at it - and ends up attracting the attention of the winter fairy king, who has a pressing need himself for currency exchange services in fantasy Lithuania and so facing the traditional "do this or die" fairytale challenge. Meanwhile, the Duke's daughter is finding that being married to the tsar comes with unexpected hazards even when you already knew that he was a squirrel-killing psycho, and the peasant's daughter Wanda that working for a Jewish family is the sort of thing you can become reconciled to very quickly when there doesn't appear to be magic going on, they are paying you actual money, food, and you're out of your abusive father's house.
I liked this a lot, and would recommend it, thought I had some significant reservations about the end and some of the structure. Novik's fairytale-meets-real world atmosphere is very successful, the winter elves convincingly creepy to the villagers, and there's a real sense of place about it all, as opposed to just generic fairytale/medievalness. The choice of a Jewish heroine is a major factor in this success; not only does Miryem's own family feel convincingly solid, it anchors the whole tale. The family's Jewishness is not just for flavour, but shown as fundamental to their lives, as is the antisemitism they face.
Less successful is telling the story from multiple POVs, of which a maximum of three out of the six are justified, and one - of a young child - extremely annoying, especially in an important scene told from his POV, which frankly made me suspect that Novik found the technical demands of telling it from a different POV beyond her. The POV spreading also doesn't help a certainly sagginess in the middle, it's no coincidence that the tightening up in the last third comes with a reduction in POVs again. Most annoyingly was an aspect of the end, which I shall spoiler cut.
( Spoilers for the end ) So I'll be writing a short fix-it fic for that, but it's not enough to stop me reccing it to people who would enjoy a wintry fairytale YA-ish fantasy.
I also owe it because it made me realise that the solution to a story idea that I had stalled on for over a decade because it didn't quite work is that while the initial idea was for a male protagonist, actually as things turned out, it would work much better if I made them female. So I might try that.
*This is not hyperbole. Couched in the language of 1953, the novel is very, very clear that Patience has literally not known women can have orgasms, and that Edward has been very selfish in bed, and that this means he can be considered irredeemable by the reader.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
