The Captive Reader

I picked up Faro’s Daughter by Georgette Heyer last week, being in the mood for some Heyer but at the same time wanting a story I didn’t know inside and out (as I know so many of Heyer’s books).  I’d only read Faro’s Daughter once ten years ago and my memory of it was suitably vague so it seemed like a good enough choice.

I quickly realised there was in fact a very good reason I had never reread it: it isn’t very good.  In fact, it is probably the worst Heyer I’ve read.

Now, I love Heyer.  I love her historical details, I love her slang-filled dialogue, I love both her madcap and more sedate plots.  I love her but this book pushed the boundaries of my patience almost to the breaking point.

We begin with a typical enough Heyer hero: Max Ravenscar is a wealthy bachelor, fond of racing, gaming, and, to some extent, his extended family.  His young cousin Adrian has fallen in love with a most unsuitable young woman and Max is called upon by his aunt to protect her precious son from this Jezebel.  Deborah Grantham, the young woman in question, is several years older than Adrian, an experienced hostess at her aunt’s gaming house, and completely uninterested in the puppy-ish Adrian. But when Ravenscar insults and attempts to bribe her into rejecting Adrian, she becomes determined to…do inexplicable things for inexplicable reasons.  Basically, it becomes increasingly ridiculous and pointless from there.  Unfortunately, there is the very beginning of the book.

Events include: an attempted elopement and an actual one, several silly young people (male and female), a creepy man who has acquired Deborah’s aunt’s debts in an attempt to coerce Deborah into a romantic (this seems too polite a word, but let’s go with it) entanglement, a few physical fights, and, let us not forget the centrepiece of Deborah’s ridiculous and entirely off-the-wall plan, a kidnapping.

There aren’t a lot of saving graces here.  Usually Heyer could rescue a ridiculous plot with a few good characters and some sparkling dialogue.  That is all sadly lacking here.  There is carriage race between Ravenscar and one of the several odious men who lurk in the background throughout, but it happens off-stage and we only hear about it second-hand.  Still, that’s about as thrilling as the story gets.  She has some promising secondary characters but they never come up to scratch and as for our hero and heroine, well they are abysmal.  I can’t think of a less romantic Heyer pairing or a less interesting one.  Aside from their first meeting (in which they play cards for hours – Ravenscar wins, naturally), they do not exchange civil words until the final pages of the novel, when presumably Heyer realised this would be necessary in order for them to become engaged.

Faro’s Daughter was published in 1941, when one must suppose Heyer was exhausted by her efforts of the previous year (both The Spanish Bride and The Corinthian came out in 1940), busy working on a new mystery novel (Envious Casca – also published in 1941), and anxious about the war.  I hope Faro’s Daughter put food on the table and clothes on her family’s backs.  That’s about all the good I can say of it.

Understandably, this did not quench my need for some Heyer.  Back now to one of the old reliables, most likely Frederica or The Grand Sophy.  After the useless Deborah, I’m in need of a capable heroine.

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I read Bath Tangle by Georgette Heyer last weekend.  If there is one author I know I can depend on to entertain and distract me when I’m feeling down or tired or just in need of entertainment and distraction, it is Heyer.  She is witty, stylish, romantic, and, above all, an immaculate historian.  What is not to love?

I believe I first discovered Heyer in 2004.  It was a week or so before I started university and I was visiting my grandmother in rural Ontario.  She had just picked up a box of books (a box!  The luxury of it!) from a library sale and there were five or six Heyer titles in it, all in lurid Pan Books paperback editions.  With little else to do each afternoon when the humid August days inevitably gave way to thunderstorms, I started reading.  Despite a lacklustre start (These Old Shades – a book I still hate), I kept reading (there were a lot of thunderstorms that week) and eventually moved on to Bath Tangle.  It didn’t make a huge impression at the time but it, along with Arabella, was enough to turn me into a devoted Heyer fan.  I nicked my grandmother’s copy of Bath Tangle and as soon as I arrived at university, the first thing I did was check out more of Heyer’s books from the library.

Lurid Pan Books edition

While I’ve read and reread Heyer with pleasure in the years since that first encounter, I think I only reread Bath Tangle once: in 2006, when I had a Heyer marathon the summer following my grandmother’s death.  It’s not that I thought it bad, it just didn’t stand out in my memory the way Heyer’s best books (such as A Civil Contract, The Grand Sophy, and Sylvester) do.  I remembered a combative hero and heroine and that was about all.  Returning to it now, I was delighted to discover what an entertaining, absorbing story it is.

The novel begins shortly after the death of the Earl of Spenborough.  He has left behind a young widow, Fanny, and an unmarried daughter, Serena, who has the peculiarly awkward position of being several years older than her step-mother.  Despite their unusual relationship, the two young women get along very well.  The bold, energetic Serena may not understand how her stepmother could be content with a quiet life spent organizing a household but then neither could sweet, docile Fanny understand how her stepdaughter could find such pleasure in political debates and daily gallops that would quite terrify most women.  Still mourning the man who united them, they decide to settle in Bath for a time.  But the arrival of two young, beautiful women cannot go without notice and it is not long before they are surrounded by friends and suitors, new and old.

One of the things I certainly didn’t appreciate the first time I read this book was Fanny’s passionate reaction to the news that a young neighbour – a girl of seventeen – is engaged to a man in his late thirties.  The girl herself knows exactly what she is getting from the match – a title, riches, an estate, an impressive position – and is smugly pleased about it – to a point – but to Fanny it is too much a reminder of how her own family pressured her into marriage.  Spenborough was a kind husband and a good man but not one Fanny would have chosen for herself, had she been in a position to do so.  She was pretty and biddable and her mama was looking for a brilliant match.  She did not consider what her daughter’s romantic fantasies might have been; when an Earl offered, Fanny was offered up, never mind that he was older than her own father.  In doing so, Fanny’s mother made her meek daughter into a champion romantic – someone who believes love should conquer all, no matter the obstacles.

Serena does not share her stepmother’s sensibilities.  Having fancied herself in love twice before – once at nineteen with a young soldier, Hector Kirkby, and then again in her early twenties, with a close family friend, Ivo Barrasford, the Marquis of Rotherham – she knows better than to put too much faith in romance.  Indeed, imagining herself in love she’d actually gone so far as to become engaged to Rotherham.  She’d broken off the engagement, scandalously, but never repented of it.  Rotherham had remained a close friend and frequent sparring partner, being one of the few people with a tongue and mind as sharp as Serena’s.  But her arrival in Bath and the surprising reintroduction of Hector Kirkby into her life makes Serena wonder if perhaps she should reconsider her views on love and marriage.

I loved the friendships in this book.  Serena and Fanny, though so different from one another, care immensely for the other’s happiness.  It is difficult to imagine a household that could please both of them completely –indeed, I doubt such a thing could ever be managed – but they compromise as best they can.  Serena tries not to scandalise Fanny too much with her fast ways, free opinions, and vulgar friends while Fanny values the confidence and protection she gains from having Serena as a companion.  Without Serena standing guard, Fanny knows she would fall victim to her scheming mother’s ways once more and that is something she is determined, in her own quiet way, to avoid.

But most of all I loved the friendship between Serena and Ivo.  Heyer excelled at writing combative couples as well as friendly couples.  Here, she combines the two and the effect is excellent.  Having known each other for ever, Ivo and Serena interact with a familiarly usually only seen within families.  They are as happy to chat as to fight and view both activities as good sport.  They use one another’s first names, they scandalise poor Fanny with their love of political gossip, and they look out for one another.  Intellectually and emotionally, they match.  The most painful moments of the book are when they hurt one another or – and this is what makes them such an appealing match – are hurting for the other.  Both become engaged to absurdly poor mates during the course of the novel and I think the most emotionally resonant part of the novel, for me, is Serena’s reaction when she learns of Ivo’s engagement.  She is not admitting she loves him and is not feeling sorry for herself; she is absolutely distraught for him and the bleak, unequal future she sees for him with the silly, shallow girl he has engaged himself to.  This level of love and friendships on both sides is what makes their final happiness so satisfying.

Bath Tangle isn’t quite up there with Heyer’s best but it certainly rests higher up on my favourites list now than it did before.

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Last week was Georgette Heyer week over at Vuples Libris.  The Book Foxes mused on The Talisman Ring, Faro’s Daughter, Black Sheep, Regency Buck, and An Infamous Army.  Now, I class Heyer alongside Austen and Trollope as one of those authors who I never tire of and who I am always delighted to see discussed on book blogs, so nothing could have been more delightful to me than these posts.  It wasn’t long (I made it until Tuesday night) before I was reaching into my own extensive Heyer collection.  After a bit of a struggle, I settled on one of the few Heyer books I still had left unread: Devil’s Cub.

The hero of Devil’s Cub is Dominic Alastair, the twenty-four year old Marquis of Vidal.  He is handsome, noble, rich, and entirely reckless.  In the opening scene, he shoots and kills a footpad who was attempting to rob him while enroute to a party.  Leaving the corpse by the side of the road, Vidal continues on as though nothing of note had happened.  This is, we soon learn, not his first murder.  But what can you expect of the son of the Duke of Avon, a man once known as Satanas?

I had held off reading this book for years because I knew it was the sequel to These Old Shades.  I hate These Old Shades.  It was one of the first Heyer novels I read, if not in fact the first, and it almost put me off her for life.  It had cross-dressing, one of the most irritating heroines of all time, and a plot that requires the reader to suspend all logic.  It was one of her earlier efforts and it shows, particularly in the less-than-polished dialogue and, for Heyer, rather sloppy structure.  So, logically enough, I was not particularly eager to read a book about the next generation of this family.

Vidal, while not quite as corrupt as his father was or quite as reckless as his mother, is still very recognizably their child.  But, with a few years more experience as a novelist, I think Heyer brings this book off much better than These Old Shades.

After a drunken duel, Vidal is confronted by his father, the Duke of Avon.  With the other duellist lying gravely injured at death’s door, Vidal could soon be responsible for a third death.   The first could be excused as inconvenient and the second as self-defense against a criminal, but a third murder becomes awkward.  While there is little question of Vidal facing any legal ramifications for his actions – there are advantages to being a Duke’s son – his father demands that he leave the country.  Vidal agrees but decides that he might as well bring along the young woman he has been attempting to seduce – an association his family decidedly disapproves of.  It is fine to dally with the lower classes and have affairs among the upper echelons of society, but a bourgeois who might expect marriage is quite another thing altogether.  And Vidal certainly has no intention of marriage where this woman is concerned.

Here is where our heroine intrudes: having discovered Vidal’s intention to abscond with her silly sister, and knowing he has no intentions of marrying her, Mary Challoner decides to play a trick on the Marquis.  Except it backfires entirely and soon she finds herself in France with Vidal.  Mary had intended to save her sister’s virtue; instead, she finds herself compromised.  But Mary, well-educated, well-mannered and quick witted, is a very different creature from her sister.  While Vidal would not have quibbled to seduce and abandon her sister, he sees how impossible that would be in Mary’s case.  And then, naturally, he decides he must marry her.  It appears there are some morals hidden within his character after all.  But Mary, despite having discovered to her own surprise that she has been half in love with Vidal for some time, does not want to be forced into a marriage with him.  What follows is a typical Heyer chase, with Vidal chasing Mary, Vidal’s mother (Leonie) and Uncle Rupert chasing him, and the Duke of Avon calmly wandering along behind them all, ready to patch up the mess that they will inevitably make of everything.

There are many familiar figures from These Old Shades.  Leonie, still outrageous though now in her forties, is an adoring and indulgent mother to her reckless son and, most irritatingly, still seems a bit in awe of her husband.  Rather than discuss Vidal’s predicament with Avon, she decides to sneak away (aided, unwillingly, by her brother-in-law Rupert) and track down her son herself.  Because that is exactly what Leonie would do.  We hear rather less of how Avon feels about his wife, but any sensible person would have been driven completely mad after a couple of decades of Leonie’s devotion and rollercoaster emotions.

Still, Leonie does provide some of the best dialogue.  She is absurd but absurd speeches are the most fun to read and, I suspect, the most fun for Heyer to write.  While Avon is disapproving of his son’s excesses and scandals, Leonie is rather proud of them.  When her nephew dares to criticise Vidal, Leonie is roused to her typical sort of rage and responds with some choice insults for the young man:

To shoot a man dead: it is terrible, you say.  For you could not do it.  You could not shoot an elephant dead.  To elope with a woman: it is scandalous!  Bien entendu, but you, you could not persuade even a blind woman to elope with you, which I find not scandalous, but tragic.

The supporting characters – largely members of the Alastair family – are excellent and, rather to my surprise, I enjoyed being reunited with some of them.  I even enjoyed seeing Avon again, which I certainly didn’t expect.  The tête-à-tête between him and Mary towards the end of the novel is one of the best scenes in the entire book.

I think I have learned an important lesson, which is that the Alastair family improves with age.  I’m not sure I’ll ever like These Old Shades but Devil’s Cub won me over by the end.  I’m now feeling the itch to reread An Infamous Army, which marks the third and final appearance of the Alastair family.

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Why did it take me so long to read The Talisman Ring by Georgette Heyer?  Hayley and Lisa had promised me I would love it and they were right.  I adored it.  It is one of the funniest books I have read in years and easily one of Heyer’s best novels.  I spent years shying away from it, discouraged by the promise of adventurous elements that had turned me off of some of Heyer’s other novels, but those were wasted years.  I shall just have to make up for them with frequent rereading in years to come.

Eustacie has no wish to marry her sober, practical cousin Sir Tristram Shield but, nevertheless, promises her dying grandfather that she will do so.  After his death and facing the threat of removal to Tristram’s mother’s home in Bath, Eustacie decides to run away…and runs straight into her fugitive cousin Ludovic, who fled to France when accused years before of murder and the theft of the titular talisman ring but who is now a free-trader.  It’s just the sort of glamourous crime to appeal to Eustacie.  The two adventurous young people strike it off immediately and while Eustacie is in raptures over her first real adventure, her more practical companions – Tristram and her new friend Miss Sarah Thane – help to keep Ludovic safe as they work to prove who really committed the crimes that Ludovic is accused of.

I can’t decide who I like best in this book.  Ludovic is charmingly young and energetic and the level-headed Tristram is my very favourite sort of Heyer hero (complete with an excellent sense of humour, which is just what you need when hanging around Ludovic and Eustacie) but it is the women who are really delightful.

The French-born Eustacie is miraculous.  Adorably hyperbolic and unfailingly romantic, she indulges in the most hair-raising fantasies and her sense of the dramatic is second to none.  Her conversations with Tristram and the indulgent Miss Thane are masterpieces.  Her dialogue with Tristram after they grudgingly find themselves engaged displays Heyer at the height of her powers:

‘Well, I suppose you will have to reconcile yourself to a period of quiet.’

‘Quiet?’ gasped Eustacie.  ‘More quiet?  No, and no, and no!’

He could not help laughing, but said: ‘Is it so terrible?’

‘Yes, it is!’ said Eustacie.  ‘First I have to live in Sussex, and now I am to go to Bath – to play backgammon!  And after that you will take me to Berkshire, where I expect I shall die.’

‘I hope not!’ said Shield.

‘Yes, but I think I shall,’ said Eustacie, propping her chin in her hands and gazing mournfully into the fire.  ‘After all, I have had a very unhappy life without any adventures, and it would not be wonderful if I went into a decline.  Only nothing that is interesting ever happens to me,’ she added bitterly, ‘so I dare say I shall just die in child-bed, which is a thing anyone can do.’

Sir Tristram flushed uncomfortably.  ‘Really, Eustacie!’ he protested.

Eustacie was too much absorbed in the contemplation of her dark destiny to pay any heed to him. ‘I shall present to you an heir,’ she said, ‘and then I shall die.’  The picture suddenly appealed to her; she continued in a more cheerful tone: ‘Everyone will say that I was very young to die, and they will fetch you from the gaming-hell where you –‘

‘Fetch me from where?’ interrupted Sir Tristram, momentarily led away by this flight of imagination.

‘From the gaming-hell,’ repeated Eustacie impatiently.  ‘Or perhaps the Cock-Pit.  It does not signify; it is quite unimportant.  But I think you will feel great remorse when it is told to you that I am dying, and you will spring up and fling yourself on your horse, and ride ventre à terre to come to my death-bed.  And then I shall forgive you, and –‘

‘What in heaven’s name are you talking about?’ demanded Sir Tristram.  ‘Why should you forgive me?  Why should – What is this nonsense?’

Eustacie, thus rudely awakened from her pleasant dream, sighed and abandoned it.  ‘It is just what I thought might happen,’ she explained.

Miss Sarah Thane, though older and significantly wiser than Eustacie, is equally game for adventure.  Travelling to London with her brother, she meets her new friends when an injured Ludovic takes shelter at the inn where the Thanes are staying and immediately decides to assist in any way she can.  The situation is a serious one but Sarah embraces what comedy comes her way.  The young lady has a decidedly satirical bent that only Tristram is intelligent enough to appreciate.  It is one of Heyer’s best matches.

I must also put in a word for Thane, Sarah’s elder brother, whose obtuse steadiness is just what the group needs.  As long as the cognac is safe in the inn’s cellar, he remains unruffled.

All ends well, of course.  The real murder is caught, two excellent couples are paired off, and one very happy reader is shown how wrong her preconceptions were.

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