dept of fabulous things

I am glad that there exists in the world a cartoon diagram of the relationships within the Bloomsbury group, including marriages, sex, crushes, unrequited love, etc. Though I wish it were bigger and included such tangles as the fact that Lytton Strachey had a crush on George Mallory (the mountaineer), who was hopelessly in love with Lytton's brother James Strachey, who was hopelessly in love with Rupert Brooke.

In other news, queer_fest has opened for prompts. I am a bit of a Queer Fest skeptic (awesome idea, so-so execution of the fics most of the time), but I did find myself leaving some prompts.

weekly reading post

I always intend to do these on Wednesday like everybody else, but lately my Wednesdays mostly involve my having to be at work at 6 am. I am not naturally a morning person, so after that I'm pretty much destroyed for coherent thought.

Currently reading:

The Best Man to Die, by Ruth Rendell. I seem to have embarked on a re-read of all Rendell's Wexford novels, in chronological order. More about that further down the post. I'm fond of TBMtD because it's the first Rendell novel with a strong homosocial-verging-on-homoerotic element between men. Some of Rendell's other novels explore this territory, and still others feature lesbian, gay, and bisexual characters, but TBMtD, published in 1969, is a nice early hint.

Society and the Homosexual, by Gordon Westwood. Still working on this.


Recently finished:

From Doon With Death, A New Lease of Death, and Wolf to the Slaughter, by Ruth Rendell. These are the first three Wexford novels. I've read them all before, in most cases more than once, but I've never read them chronologically. Rendell is distinctively herself even in the first book, but many things about these early books are different from later ones. The first book is written from the POV of Inspector Mike Burden, Chief Inspector Wexford's second-in-command. None of the other books are, and I'm curious about why Rendell gave up on Burden as narrator. Burden in this book is presented as soft-hearted and cultured, rather than the cheerfully puritanical, somewhat right-wing philistine he is later, and he's contrasted to Wexford, who is rather crude, crass, and overbearing instead of the introspective, well-read, deeply emotional man of the later books. Their characters don't settle down into the forms they've kept, more or less, for the rest of the series until the fourth book (The Best Man to Die, which I'm currently reading), which is also the first book to have Wexford as the main POV character. The second book is mostly in the POV of an outside character, while the third book is told largely from the perspective of a police constable who works for Wexford.

These four books have a lot of 1960s-era social upheavals (even between the first book, published in 1964, and the fourth, published in 1969, you get the sense that a world has changed), especially in terms of gender and sexuality, and some pretty depressing looks--I'm not sure they were all meant to be depressing at the time--at the limitations on women's lives. Also, the first book, From Doon With Death, has (MAJOR SPOILERS, skip) a lesbian character. Admittedly, she is a miserable, nearly insane lesbian who is also the murderer, but the book is pretty insistent that there's nothing innately wrong with the love she feels for another woman. Also, and I'm not sure if this is deliberate on Rendell's part, it's possible to read a lot of the character's terrible mental state as a consequence of cultural and internalized homophobia.

London Falling, by Paul Cornell. I don't have much to add to what I said last week. I enjoyed the book all the way through and can recommend it pretty wholeheartedly, nothing objectionable happened to the gay character, and my only complaint is that I get frustrated when a novel ends in such a way that it's obviously the first of a series. London Falling's main plot was resolved, but there's an overarching plot that isn't, and even though I like series, that strategy always bothers me a little.

I'm sometimes leery of reading Paul Cornell's work because his Christian beliefs tend to be very very evident in his books. I liked many aspects of British Summertime, for example, but I've never quite been able to forgive it for suggesting that if everyone were Christian (and, to be fair, if Christianity itself were quite different from how it's usually practiced now) the world could be a utopia. Anyway, while there's some strongly Christian imagery in London Falling, such as a place that might be hell and figures who might be the devil and God or Jesus, there's also, so far, plenty of room for other interpretations, and a major character who is emphatically not a believer and who voices those other interpretations. Hopefully he's not being set up for a conversion experience, but if he is, it certainly hasn't happened as of London Falling.


What I'm reading next:

More Rendell. And I've acquired Pat Barker's Toby's Room from the library. It's a sequel to Life Class, about which I had mixed feelings, and after a skim I'm not sure I'm going to like Toby's Room much; it has Tragic Dead Gays and it also resurrects a romance which Life Class made very clear (I thought) was a bad idea for both parties. But I want to give it a try anyway.